With the release of Workstation 4.5.2, VMware stopped virtual disks and partitions “home-made” operations like moving from a smaller vdisk to a larger one, changing vdisk type, and so on.
The new Virtual Disk Manager do all of these tasks and more:
– Automate the management of virtual disks with scripts.
– Create virtual disks that are not associated with a particular virtual machine, to be used as templates, for example.
– Switch the virtual disk type from preallocated to growable, or vice versa. When you change the disk type to growable, you reclaim some space on the virtual disk. You can shrink the virtual disk to reclaim even more disk space.
– Expand the size of a virtual disk so it is larger than the size specified when you created it.
– Defragment virtual disks.
– Prepare and shrink virtual disks without powering on the virtual machine. (Windows hosts only.)
VDM will work on vdisks created with VMware GSX Server, VMware Workstation and VMware VirtualCenter (provided the virtual disk was created on a GSX Server host managed by VirtualCenter).
The only spot is that there is no GUI for it: just command line program.
Anyone wanna develop a GUI frontend for this, uh?