As many have journeyed from dedicated physical servers to virtualization, you may recall a tool that helps with these migrations. vCenter Server Converter Standalone converts physical to virtual and virtual to virtual.
Environments today contain settings and sizings that can be optimized a little bit. One example I plan on covering in this blog is ‘vdisk’ sizing for Windows partitions.
In the upcoming steps, I will perform a virtual-to-virtual conversion to resize a vdisk where I want to shrink the provisioned disk.
We have a VM with a 1TB vDisk configured, the only disk, the Windows boot partition, and has the Default vSAN Storage Policy (RAID 1 Mirroring and Thin Provision) These details may not matter to everyone, but it’s good to share. Here is what my existing VM looks like in settings
Disk 0 as a Dynamic Disk and has 924GB of Unallocated space that cannot be extended natively in Disk Management, this would require some additional partitioning tools if you needed to expand this partition. Our goal for today is to v2v (Virtual to Virtual) migration.
From another system where converter is installed on, launch vCenter Server Standalone Converter and click ‘Convert Machine’
Populate the information for your target Remote System (I had to disable some Windows Firewalls internally) please ensure you take proper measures to open the necessary ports for VMware vCenter Converter Standalone, check out TCP/IP and UDP Port Requirements for port and protocol as well as other information.
Also, you can perform this operation on a machine Powered Off or Powered On.
An agent will need to be deployed on the Remote System, this is here
It populates machine information
Populate information for the destination, which is the vCenter in our case.
The destination for the VM will remain the same, however you may want change the object name from the default one and ensure it’s not the same as what is existing.
Choose the cluster resource, datastore and hardware version, by default this selected Hardware version 21, however my VM is on HW 19, so please be careful of accepting defaults
Under ‘Data to copy’ press Edit
From here you can select any volumes that do not need to carry over, and then click ‘Destination layout.
In the ‘Destination Layout under VirtualDisk1 level change it from ‘Thick to Thin’
For the C:\ under ‘Size/Capacity/ column, from the drop-down menu select <Type size in GB>, this will have an input box to specify size in GB.
Type in the desired amount in GB and click away. Note that the new size of the vdisk on the VM will be 120.27 provisioned. This will be displayed as a fraction.
Once you complete that, if you click away anywhere to the left, it will automatically save your changes.
Click ‘Edit’ under Advanced and we want to use some Post Conversion settings
I want to power on the destination machine after completion in addition to powering off the destination.
Validate your settings and click ‘Finish’
The job is already off to the races..
If we go over to the vCenter we can see the VM has been created
Conversion completed successfully.
Although the VM does show a fraction, it’s something small compared to reclaiming almost a TB of storage.
The disk is also back to Basic and the Unallocated space is gone
I will give some background, it does not always execute perfectly, a lot has to do with permissions on systems, and network connectivity between systems so I highly encourage planning, backup, and backout plans as well as testing.
Many settings within the Center Server Converter can be modified, not everything may come over like-for-like.
