eshedg wrote: @WoodyZ - You're right - the vCenter standalone is the tool to use. It is what I used to begin-with, and it is how I ended up with a 160GB VMDK.
Then I submit you didn't make proper choices as you walked through the Wizard to begin with!
If your Physical Machine used disk space was only ~38 GB then you could have initially created the VM so is virtual disk was appropriately sized and not 160 GB.
If your Physical Machine used disk space was only ~38 GB then you could have initially created the VM so is virtual disk was appropriately sized and not 160 GB.Well, it so happens that I had ALL my stuff on that laptop, so it got all packed into that VMDK.
Once I got it to the new Mac laptop, I took stuff Out from the VMDK into the physical Mac drive.
Now, I had disk space twice-wasted - Once on bloated VMDK, and once on the physical Mac drive.
But in any case, if you expand a VMDK over time, and you want to clean it up and shrink it back - You are in the same situation.
WoodyZ wrote:
Re issues with "Migrate your PC" - Maybe you're right... I didn't have any problem with it, maybe because I migrated off of a VM running locally on my Mac (V2V, if you will
).
You could have installed VMware vCenter Converter Standalone in the Windows Virtual Machine and created as right-sized and type disk directly to the external drive and not have to go through all the rigamarole you did!
I will try it the next time I need to deflate a VMDK... maybe the wizard really does the trick, without having to shrink the partition in advance.
(BTW exchanging big files between Win and Mac is by itself a story to tell... it is anything but strightforward, if you happen to have a larger-than-2GB file, which I did).
I have to thoroughly disagree. I've been exchanging large files, up to .5 TB each, between Windows and OS X and vice versa using both Network and external storage, whether formatted NTFS and or HFS+, and all without incident or issues and it been totally straightforward. If you're having issues then I'd submit you're not doing something right.
I don't know... whatever I tried, Mac Finder refused to copy the big VMDK from an external drive, whether it was NTFS (R/O for Mac) or exFAT. I ended up FTPing it via direct ethernet connection (could've used SMB as well, but it's a corporate PC... folder sharing over net is policy-restricted).
Had I known that from the start, I would of course made a sparse VMDK and go with FAT32, but I didn't anticipate this problem... and I didn't want to spend hours again on the P2V process.
(the PC was a really nasty laptop, really slow).
I will say that the one thing in your original post that has merit is that what should always be done whether doing P2V, V2V or V2P is proper prep of the source and with Windows one can simply run Disk Cleanup to clean up the majority of the non-used data side of the cleanup prior to making the image and as far as the Page File goes IIRC that it a choice to copy or not within the Wizard or maybe vCenter Converter Preferences, don't remember off the top which. Clean up of User Data before migration is of course ones choice on a case by case basis.
Yep. I can't relive that past moment, but I'll take your educated advice that my bind was avoidable.
Then again - It happens.