May 8, 2019 Software

How to shrink VMDK with a couple of PowerShell scripts?

While extending a VMDK file is a fairly easy task that can be performed right in Disk Manager, shrinking a virtual disk is a bit tricky. And, you need to be really careful because unless done properly, reducing virtual disk size may cause data loss! Sure, you can just use VMware Converter to make a VMDK smaller, but, for my money, it is always better to have a script at hand. In this article, I’ll discuss how to shrink virtual disks with 2 simple PowerShell scripts.

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September 19, 2018 Software

4 ways to extract the content from VMDK when a VM is totally dead

Sometimes, you badly need your ESXi VM data, but that thing just cannot be powered on for some reason! Well, you can try starting that VM one more time according to this article and access the data with a little luck. But, if you are out of luck and the VM is dead, you need another method to extract its VMDK file content.
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November 23, 2017 Software

V2V Converters Overview

Nowadays, virtualization has become one of the main worldwide trends in the IT sphere. The virtual environment helps saving money, making infrastructure easier to administrate, and giving more possibilities for scaling. A large variety of hypervisors from different vendors with different functionality and a number of virtual machines available for deployment are already present on the market. In most cases, hypervisor vendors have their proprietary VM types incompatible with those of competitors’. That is why sometimes it might be a challenge to deploy one hypervisor’s virtual machines on other hypervisors. This may come up with a very painful migration process between hypervisors in case of changing one, moving to different hardware or having several different hypervisors running. A V2V (virtual machine to virtual machine) converter could help solving this task. It can convert a VM and move one between VM formats and physical environments where the hypervisor is running. The review of the most popular and well-known solutions of VM converters will be provided in this article.

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