VMWare – Moving thin VMDKs and keeping them thin! SIMPLIFIED!
Moving thin disks and keeping them thin after the move can be a pain. Here are the quick steps needed to move a Virtual Machine with thin provisioned disks.
- Enable SSH on your ESXi box
- cd vfms/volumes
- Find your target VMFS volume i.e. /vmfs/volume/iSCSI RAID 5/
- Navigate into the target VMFS volume and create a directory for the new virtual machine i.e. win2k8_server
- cd into the new directory
- Highlight and copy the directory
- go back to /vmfs/volumnes
- Find your source VMFS volume i.e. vmfs/volumes/Local RAID 5/win2k8_server
- Navigate into the source VMFS volume
- Navigate into the virtual machine directory you want to copy
- Copy the VMX file over to the target directory
- Finally, use the following command to copy the VMDK
vmkfstools –i source.vmdk target.vmdk –d thin - Done!
