I am doing P2V of a laptop.
Edit: I am using WorkStation 7.1.4 on the host machine for this.
I have created a new virtual machine and used vmware vdiskmanager to clone a physical drive to a virtual disk.
This method is described in a thread from 2 months or so ago.
The source disk originally used about 430 Gb of space on a 500 Gb disk, but before I cloned it I deleted the big data parts (basically a whole bunch of virtual machines) from the source. I also emptied the recycle bin. This brought down the disk usage to 133 Gb.
Then I used the Win7 disk defragger to defragment the source disk in preparation for P2V operations.
The vdiskmanager worked overnight to successfully create a clone of the physical disk, but the size on the media (a LaCie USB3 1 Tb drive) of the vmdk file was more than 450 Gb. This is too much for 133 Gb of data.
Note that the vmdk file is a resizable virtual disk (Disk space is not preallocated).
So now I tried using the WorkStation Utility to "compact" this virtual disk. It also worked overnight but the result is barely visible on the size of the vmdk file if at all. It is now 476 Gb in size on my host drive.
Inside WorkStation settings for the virtual hard drive after compaction this is reported:
Capacity:
Current size: 455.3 GB (this seems to be the size of the vmdg file)
System free: 185.8 GB (this seems to be the remaining free space on my host drive)
Maximum size: 465.8 GB (I don't know what this could be)
So what can I do to really compact this virtual disk to a sensible host drive size?
I would have expected the physical size to reach some 150 GB or so....
