Shrink a VM Disk

• Defrag drive:

 e4defrag /

• Zero out free space:

 dd if=/dev/zero bs=1048576 of=/zero ; sync ; rm /zero

• Punch holes on zeros:

 vmkfstools -K /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/arditi/arditi_1.vmdk

• Create a new disk with smaller disk space:

 ESXi (thin provisioned disk)

• Create partition table for the new smaller disk and shrink the drive size and get rid of swap partition:

 GParted Live CD (smaller disk with msdos partition table, resize the larger disk to small form factor and delete the swap partition)

• Clone the bigger disk to smaller disk ignoring disk addresses:

 Clonezilla (drive-to-drive, Expert mode using -icds operator)

• Change the SCSI order:

 ESXi (SCSI 0:0 assigned to the newly cloned disk to boot from)