vSphere shrink hard drive on windows OS

1. shrink HDD using windows disk management.
2. connect to host using SSH
3. turn off windows computer
4. cd /vmfs/volumes/<datastore name>/<VM foldername>
5. use cat “VM name.vmdk” (not the flat one) to make a note of the RW number#
6. calculate new size 128GB= 128 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 /512 = 268435456
7. vi “VM name.vmdk” replace RW with the new number
8. vi edit shift I is to edit text; ESC to end editing; exit and save changes shift :x; shift:q! is to exit without changes
9. use vSphere to migrate or move VM to a temporary host (this will resize the HDD to the new size)
10. be patient depending on the HDD size it can take some time
11. verify size in temporary location using vSphere
12. move back to original location

 

Links:

https://www.experts-exchange.com/articles/12938/HOW-TO-Shrink-a-VMware-Virtual-Machine-Disk-VMDK-in-15-minutes.html