small brain dump and more

just summary 😉

1. fill with zeros empty space in runing VM OS
2. Windows – SDelete from Sysinternal LINK
3. Linux – fill up each mount point/partition with command

   dd if=/dev/zero of=ZEROFILE bs=1000000 ; rm -f ZEROFILE

   
   

4. Check real size of allocated data in VM
   

   du -h MyVM.vmdk

   
   

5. From ESX shell , run command to shrink vmdk disk (shutdown VM first)

   vmkfstools --punchzero MyVM.vmdk

6. Check real size of allocated data in VM after (should be less)
   

   du -h MyVM.vmdk

   
   

7. log off
8. If not Thin provisioned disk, use another post 😉