KiXtart script to shrink VMDK for smaller VCB backups
April 13th, 2010
1 comment
When I first started using VMware ESX I was testing VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) to dump my virtual machines to a staging area before being copied offsite. I noticed that one of the VMs had a VMDK attached that as far as the OS (Windows Server 2003) was concerned with had all of the data deleted on that volume. After initiating a VCB dump (backup) on the VM I noticed that the VMDK that was dumped to my staging area strangely appeared to contain data. The VMDK size was considerably larger than it should have been for a disk that Windows reported as containing zero data.