VMWare Cloning to Change Disk Provisioning - How Painful is It?
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@ajstringham said:
I don't know how you'd do it with Veeam, but with Unitrends you do a full backup of the VM as a physical machine, do a Bare Metal restore on a newly sized VHD, then a file level restore, then, in this case, a SQL restore. I know, however, that Veeam is 100% virtual. That's just my 2 cents. You could always get a UEB Free and do this one machine this one time. It'll give you a good taste of Unitrends too.
I'm thinking I can do it in VMWare without any assistance from Veeam. Or at least that was my understanding that I could.
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@NetworkNerd said:
@ajstringham said:
I don't know how you'd do it with Veeam, but with Unitrends you do a full backup of the VM as a physical machine, do a Bare Metal restore on a newly sized VHD, then a file level restore, then, in this case, a SQL restore. I know, however, that Veeam is 100% virtual. That's just my 2 cents. You could always get a UEB Free and do this one machine this one time. It'll give you a good taste of Unitrends too.
I'm thinking I can do it in VMWare without any assistance from Veeam. Or at least that was my understanding that I could.
Not sure how you'd change from thick to thin though.
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If you got the space, why not do it through the OS? Robocopy/clone over the drive to a thin provisioned VMDK, then delete the thick provisioned VMDK. Then modify the OS to make the "new" drive the same letter as the "old" drive.
Myself, I would just clone the thing using something like DriveXML. Quick and dirty, just how I likes it.
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No external tools needed, the directions for going from thin to thick or thick to thin are here:
Changing VMware vSphere Drive Provisioning from Thick to Thin
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I thought Windows allowed you to grow/shrink partitions these days (except the system partition)?
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@Dashrender said:
I thought Windows allowed you to grow/shrink partitions these days (except the system partition)?
That does not affect VM thin/thick provisioning. that is the guest inside.
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@JaredBusch said:
@Dashrender said:
I thought Windows allowed you to grow/shrink partitions these days (except the system partition)?
That does not affect VM thin/thick provisioning. that is the guest inside.
Understood, but you can grow/shrink partitions in VMWare as well - though - now that I put more thought it into, perhaps shrinking a partition in VMWare would be bad since it might shrink area that has data instead of free space area.
original though was, use windows to shrink partition, then use VMWare to shrink disk
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@Dashrender said:
I thought Windows allowed you to grow/shrink partitions these days (except the system partition)?
It does, so does Linux. But we are not talking about partitions at all, nor Windows.
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@Dashrender said:
Understood, but you can grow/shrink partitions in VMWare as well
No partitions here. We are talking about a file, not a partition.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Understood, but you can grow/shrink partitions in VMWare as well
No partitions here. We are talking about a file, not a partition.
THINKS - aw yes.. you're right - I see my missing logic.
