I recently was tasked to convert a couple physical servers to virtual machines.

The physical servers basically had 2x 500GB SSDs in a RAID1 configuration, and the total used space was around 40GB.

To optimize the storage for the virtual machines, I needed to resize the VMDK files accordingly. This process involves several steps to ensure data integrity and minimize downtime.

Here I document the steps I took to safely resize a VMDK file, without modifying the virtual machine description file (VMX).