Drupal

Tonight I have been working on a project in which I have been running VMWare Fusion through its paces. The first thing you see in all of the demos and articles seems to be the Unity feature which blends the guest OS with OS X. And some advanced graphics capabilities make for a nice, visually interesting article.

What I'm doing tonight is not as visually interesting but is quite cool from the standpoint of managing VMs. This might be mundane to you Workstation users out there, but that would be a separate article. I guess I'm impressed at how far Fusion has come in the time it's been on the market.

Scenario:

VM hosting provider wants my VM to be contained in one flat VMDK file. The VM I need to deploy came from ESX and has two VMDK files, with preallocated space. They are 8GB and 16GB in size, respectively.

I've previously done a similar task with the same source VM and worked with the hosting provider to just make it work as-is. The upload took ages and it's not a standard config for this host. For this VM instance I want to stay within their parameters to save upload time on my end and to possibly ease maintenance on their end. I also want to run through the process just to see how it works.

How It All Went Down:

VMWare Fusion 3.1 has the ability to remove the preallocated attribute from virtual disks. On each disk I went ahead and did this. You can observe the temp file created during this conversion; it didn't take all that long. CPU and memory utilization was pretty low on my MacBook Pro. This would seem to be a disk IO-bound process.

After removing the preallocated space attribute, the option of Disk Cleanup becomes available. This will shrink the virtual disk files. In this particular case, each VMDK shrank to around 6 GB. Already, it's a big win on my end in terms of making copies of the VM and moving things around in general.

Now to merge the VMDKs...

Since there does not seem to be a VMWare tool to handle this, I am going to boot the new shrunken VM into the Clonezilla LiveCD. I just pulled the latest ISO down to where I can easily point VMWare Fusion's virtual CD-ROM. This will come in handy many times in the future.

I've tested the LiveCD and it boots okay. So now I've shut down the VM to increase the boot VMDK size to encompass the other, larger one which contains data, in this case a web site.