How do I shrink a VMware ESXi disk?
Amelia Brooks
Updated on April 01, 2026
How do I shrink a VMware ESXi disk?
Press Control-Alt-Delete to login to the virtual machine. Select Disk Management, and select the partition you need to shrink. Right Click the Volume/Partition to shrink, and select Shrink.
How do I resize a virtual disk in VMware?
Select Window > Virtual Machine Library. Select a virtual machine in the Virtual Machine Library window and click Settings. In the Settings window, click the hard disk you want to resize. Use the Disk size slider to set the new size.
How do I shrink a thick provisioned disk in VMware?
You can try a Storage vMotion and select thin provisioning on the destination route:
- Right-click the virtual machine, and click Migrate.
- Click Change datastore.
- Click Next, and select a datastore that is not the same as the current datastore.
- From the dropdown, select the Thin Provision virtual disk format.
How do I reclaim space from thin provisioned VMDK?
Reclaiming disk space is a two steps process
- Step 1: Delete the blocks on the Guest OS. Windows Operating System. Download SDelete Command Line Tool available at
- Step 2: Reclaim space on VMFS. Power off the virtual machine.
Can you shrink a thin provisioned disk?
Having thin provisioned disk is usually no longer a performance problem so it is a valid design choice even in production. A common issue with thin disks is that the size will grow when required, but never shrink. When you require the capacity only once you might want to get it back from the virtual machine.
How do I reduce the size of Hyper V virtual hard drive?
In a nutshell, in order to shrink or compact virtual hard disks, you should do the following:
- Open Hyper-V Manager.
- Launch the Edit Virtual Hard Disk Wizard.
- Specify the virtual hard disk whose size you want to reduce.
- Select the action you want to perform (Shrink or Compact).
- Click Finish to accept the changes.
Can you shrink a disk in VMware?
When a virtual machine is powered on, you shrink its virtual disks from the VMware Tools control panel. You cannot shrink virtual disks if a snapshot exists. To remove the snapshot if one exists, choose VM > Snapshot > Snapshot Manager > Delete.
How do I shrink a Hyper V disk?
How do I reduce provisioned size in VMware?
The only supported way to reduce the size of a disk by VMware is to use standalone converter and carry out a V2V and during the converter wizard you can specify the size of the disk. You will end up with a copy of the VM with the correct disk size and you can simply delete the original VM.
What is the difference between thin-provisioned disk and thick provisioned disk?
A thin-provisioned disk exhibits the same performance as a lazy-zeroed thick-provisioned disk. A thick-provisioned eager-zeroing disk will write data faster than a thin-provisioned disk. Because of overprovisioning, thin provisioning will cause problems when users approach their maximum storage capacity.
Can you shrink a thick provisioned disk?
You can shrink it, but the VM must be shut down and transferred to another data store. When transferring, you can change the provisioning from thick to thin. Once that ‘s done, you can shrink the volume from within the disk manager in computer management.
Can you shrink VHDX?
The Resize-VHD cmdlet changes the maximum physical size of a virtual hard disk. It can expand both VHD and VHDX files but can shrink only VHDX files. The shrink operation fails if it would shrink the virtual disk to less than its minimum size (available through the VHDX object’s MinimumSize property).