How to Decrease a VM Disk Size

[netpage]

Hi,

I'll start by saying I am new to Proxmox, nevertheless, I have configured the server and moved a lot of VMs already and it is working well. I have noticed that some of the VMs we have are very large in size and taking up a lot of disk space. I want to reduce the disk size of any VM that we know will never grow.

I have also attached a screenshot of what our file system is. I hope the screenshot can be used to help.

Just note that we are migrating from ESXi Server.

Thanks in advance.

 

[UdoB]

Most people tend to use "thin provisioning". A virtual disk may seem to be very large but it occupies only a smaller amount of actual space.

• https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-pvesm.html#_thin_provisioning

But yes, usually I try to keep my virtual disks small. Enlarging them later on is definitely easier than shrinking. (This is true for ZVOL, not for Datasets, where you just reassign a lower quota.)

Sorry, an ultimate way to shrink down virtual disks does not exists. It always involves doing "something specific" from inside of the specific guest as it has to shrink its filesystems by itself - this can not be done from the outside. Think "I want to replace my physical disk in my physical computer with a smaller one, what do I have to do?"

 

[netpage]

Thanks for the reply.