First of is this even possible? I would like to Convert Fat Provisioned disk with snapshots to Thin Provisioned disks. We are running low on disk space on a our data store. I should have made all disks thin to begin with but did not...
I can convert a VMDK from fat to thin using the below code. However when I attempt to remove the 'old' fat VMDK from the virtual machine and add the newly cloned thin VMDK I receive an error message 'cannot remove virtual disk ... parent disks is part of a snapshot..' I understand this but am unsure of how to attach the cloned thin VMDK to the virtual machine. Do I need to convert the base VMDK file to thin as well? Edit the configuration file to manually point to thin snapshot?
vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/datastore/Folder/VMName-000002.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/datastore/Folder/VMName-000002_Thin.vmdk -d 'thin'
Disk 02 is the latest snapshot in the series. A file name VMName-Snapshot1.vmsn also exists but this file is very small. The KB article does not really mention how to attach it. It just says to start with the latest delta disk which in this is disk 2.
VMware KB: Cloning and converting virtual machine disks with vmkfstools
Am I missing something obvious or is this not possible?
Thanks for any assistance on this matter.