I have an old linux VM which used be be a file server amongst other things.
Its file archive has now been moved to an instance of openfiler, so it no longer needs several hundreg gig of disk it was originally allocated and I'd liek to reclaim it for other purposes.
I have cleared the filesystem, unmounted it and deleted the partition, so I now have a large block of empty disk.
My first thought was to simply resize the disk, but shrinking vmdk's is not possible, and the disk contains a linux ext2 filesysetm, I can't use the standalone converter to resize the disk either, so I'm somewhat stuck.
My backup plan was to make the disk shared and simply allow another VM to create a new partiion in the unused space, vmfs will take care of preventing disk corruption and no filesystems will be shared, but i discovered I could not make the disk shared as it did not meet the clustering requirements (presumably it is zeroedthick rather than eagerzeroedthick).
After a bit of research I discovered that I could use vmkfstools to inflate the disk, which changes it to eagerzeroed and should therefore allow it to be shared. Unortunately, this proved unsuccessuly, I tried this several times, but the inflate process failed consistently at 88% with the error:
Write error to virtual disk (leviathan.vmdk)Invalid argument (1441801)
So now I am out of ideas, this is a fairly ancient machine which was originally created by a P to V conversion. I'd really rather not have to back it up and create a new disk unless there really is no alternative, so I would appreciate any suggestions people can offer, either how to resize the disk, or what could be the problem preventing me from inflating it.
Cheers.
P