Hello,
I wanted to ask for advice, as I'm running out of ideas.
I have v13 VM deployed on VMFS 6 datastore, working on ESX 6.5
Attached thinly-provisioned 10 TB disk for my Guest OS Windows 2012 R2 installation. Volume is configued as Dynamic (no additional configuration such as software raid etc.)
The 10 TB disk was almost full, so I deleted about 3 TB of data. The problem is - VMDK is not getting shrinked at all, it stays at almost 10 TB.
My understanding is it's because Windows doesn't optimize Dynamic disk (trim, slab consolidation, defrag etc.), so deleted blocks are never released.
Possible solutions (that won't work in my case):
- use "sdelete" tool and vMotion/V2V the VM - can't do due to lack of resources
- convert the volume from Dynamic back do Basic - can't do since it involves deleteing all data
Any other ideas? For example:
- is there any way to force retrim/optimization on Dynamic disk?
- any tool that can convert Dynamic to Basic fast and without data loss? Of course, I do have backups.