Replication change Thin Provisioning Size

[jharlow]

First I am trying to figure out how to change the Thin Provisioned size of a VM. I set it to 256GB (1MB blocks ) and of course ran into a problem with Veeam not able to mount the VM in a VLAB. I understand through the normal VI Client, this cannot be done, so the next step was to just recreate a new VM "replicating" the data (Exchange) so I can change the actual size during the process. I see doing a replication I can change from original size, thick and thin but there is no option to change the actual allocation. Is this not possible? If not, can you provide me with any suggestions on how I can fix this newbie error?

Our currently Exchange server is only using 80GB. While the 1MB block is regrettable, I really do not see the 256GB limit really being a problem. All of the other VMs are low space requirements. That said, obviously got to change the 256GB partition so that I can mount the Veeam Backup files for restores.

Eventually I will get another VM server (physical server) up and running and will be able to move these vms temporary so I can change that block size but I have no place to store this stuff at the moment other than on the current datastore. Ugh !

[jlehtinen]

Only ways I know how to do that are:

- Use a vConverter type software and run a V2V conversion, changing vmdk size in transit
- Capture the VM image using third party imaging software, like Acronis, or Ghost, then redeploy that image with the new sized partition

[jharlow]

Thanks. Trying out the vConvertor tool now. Only problem I saw, is I will loss the Thin Provisioning option. I can only manually set the VM size, which I set to 196GB. Lets see if that works and will let me still use Veeam.

[Gostev]

I believe you can easily convert thick disk to thin with vSphere client... I remember a few customers posting about doing this on forum right after vSphere 4 was released