Thursday, June 12, 2014

Shrink a VMware VMDK from command line

I needed to shrink a number of VMWare Workstation 9 virtual disk files (VMDK files) from the command line.

VMWare Workstation 9 doesn’t include the vmware-mount.exe utility, which is needed to mount the drive for preparation.  It is also not included in the Virtual Disk Development Kit 5.5, but can be found in version 5.1.  You can download this from here, although it may possibly move.  Searching the vmware support site for VDDK 5.1 windows may help find it.

Using the powershell script available here can allow you to cycle through a number of VMDK files, additionally perform a contig (available here) to defrag the VMDK files on the physical media.

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