Shrink Ext4 partition on VMware player

10 Jun 2011 Matteo Mattei linux vmware

Few days ago I spent some times trying to shrink my Ubuntu 11.04 appliance with root partition formatted with EXT4 filesystem.

The main problem is that the current VMware tools (8.4.6, build-385536) does not support the ext4 shrink. If you run sudo vmware-toolbox, your root partition is formatted in ext4 and you try to execute the shrink, an error message like the following could appear.

Anyway there is a trick to streamline the final vmdk size. Run this command within a shell into the guest system:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/zero.raw bs=20480
rm -f /zero.raw

Then, shutdown the virtual image and download the vdiskmanager tool from VMware website.

Now run the vmware-vdiskmanager with the -k parameter:

vmware-diskmanager -k /path/to/image.vmdk

This operation will take a while, but at the end you will get a considerable smaller vmdk image file.