For some unknown reason, the LSI RAID controller in my server won't let me mirror an existing drive without blowing it up. Very annoying. So I'm stuck trying to back up my vmware situation and restoring it after I create this mirror and format it.
I'm all good with reinstalling ESX and getting this all back up and running - but I have a problem. My VMs were deployed from OVF files which had big built-in drive reservations which I really did not need. I provisioned them thinly and this has worked just fine. Most of them, although they have reservations of 50G, take up no more than 3G on the VM file system. This is a very good thing, because it's let me put up a lot of machines in very little space.
However, when backing these up (by copying their folders out of the datastore) I note that vSphere expands their virtual disk file to the full size of the reservation and renames the file by adding "-flat" to the filename. This is OK, I have plenty of space on my computer to store these temporarily - however, I do not have enough space on the ESX host to restore them all at full -flat size. So how do I re-thin them when I get them back on the ESX host?
Thanks in advance for any assistance you may provide,
H.