VMware vSphere

This should be on the computer I installed VMware vCenter Server, correct? I have looked for the program and can't find it. It isn't on the clients, is it?

The vmware-vdiskmanager.exe utility is used to manage/modify existing virtual disks on hosted VMware products, such as VMware Server and VMware Workstation. It is not present on VMware vCenter.

What are you trying to do with the utility? Are you trying to make a virtual hard disk bigger?

I'm trying to follow the instructions for shrinking a thin provisioned disk. I used sDelete on the Windows VM because ~2GB was removed. This was the first step of the instructions. The second step says to use vmware-vdisk manager to reduce the size.

I looked for shrink in the VMtools but it says it is disable because the disk in not persistent. However, I checked and it is in persistent mode. How do I reclaim the 7GB of zeroes that are now in the vmdk?

When it comes to shrinking virtual hard disks, I find that the fastest and easiest way to do it is to simply use VMware Converter. You can resize drives as part of the conversion and you have much less risk of issue, since if the conversion goes bad you still have the source VM in a clean state.

I've done a little more research and found out there is no straight-forward way to reclaim the disk space. The easiest method I found is to migrate the vmdk file to another datastore.

I'll throw it out there one more time that shrinking volumes in general is very easy with VMware Converter. It works for both thin and thick provisioned disks and can be a real time saver.

I'll admit I don't have any experience with converter. When the decision was made to virtualize we had a collection of individual machines that were providing multiple services. Quite often these services were not related to each other. When we started to virtualize we created new virtual machines and installed the services in a much more organized manner. We started with the least important services and learned from some early errors. Once we got the kinks worked out, the rest of the services were easier to install. No machines were imported. All the VMs were built from scratch.

I migrated the datastore twice. The first time was to another datastore. The second was back to it's original location. It took about an hour but I got about 11GB back. I don't expect this machine to grow a lot or quickly, so I should save all the space I can.

When Windows writes to a hard drive, does it first write into the space that was used by deleted files or does it first write into never used space or does it do something else?

VMware Converter makes this process easier by eliminating that second step of moving the VM back to the original datastore. Provided you have enough space on the first datastore, you can perform the conversion (and shrink the HD) to the same datastore. Once you confirm that the VM is up and running correctly then you can delete the original VM and work off of the converted copy. It sounds complicated but it is actually very simple. VMware Converter is a free product so you are welcome to download it and do some testing to see for yourself.

Where WIndows writes files depends on whether or not the drive is fragmented or not. If there is free space in the middle of the drive due to fragmentation, it may write part of the file in that free space and the rest at the end of the drive. Despite what others have said fragmentation is still an issue when using virtual machines. It can degrade VM performance just like it can on a physical server, so you should consider defragmenting your VMs. Just be aware that the defragmentation process is heavy on the disk I/O and it may end up affecting performance of all VMs on that datastore while it is running, so be sure to schedule it appropriately.