Reducing the Virtual Disk Capacity

Parallels Server Bare Metal provides a possibility to reduce the size of an expanding virtual disk by setting the limit the disk cannot exceed. In general, the process of reducing a virtual disk includes these steps:

1. Finding out the minimum capacity to which the disk can be reduced.
2. Running the prl_dsk_tool resize command to reduce the disk.

Checking the Minimum Disk Capacity

Before reducing a virtual disk, you may wish to see the minimum capacity to which it can be reduced. To do this, use the prl_disk_tool resize --info command. For example, you can run the following command to get detailed information on the MyVM-0.hdd disk:

# prl_disk_tool resize --info --hdd /vz/MyVM.pvm/MyVM-0.hdd

Operation progress 100 %

Disk information:

Size: 65537M

Minimum: 2338M

Minimum without resizing the last partition: 65523M

The information on the virtual disk is presented in the form of the following table:

Reducing the Disk Size

Once you know the minimum capacity of the virtual disk, you can start reducing it. For example, to reduce the MyVM-0.hdd disk to 30 GB, you can execute the following command:

# prl_disk_tool resize --size 30G --hdd /vz/MyVM.pvm/MyVM-0.hdd --resize_partition

Operation progress 100 %

When reducing the disk capacity, keep in mind the following:

• You cannot reduce the capacity of a virtual disk if the virtual machine using this disk is running.
• The virtual machine using the virtual disk you want to configure must not have any snapshots. Otherwise, you will be informed of this fact:

  # prl_disk_tool resize --size 68000 --hdd /vz/MyVM.pvm/MyVM-0.hdd/

  This disk has one or more snapshots and cannot be resized.

  You need to delete snapshots using the pctl tool before resizing the disk.

  In this case, you should delete all existing snapshots and run the command again. To learn how to delete virtual machine's snapshots, refer to Deleting a Snapshot .

• The capacity of an expanding virtual disk shown from inside the virtual machine and the size the virtual disk occupies on the server's physical disk may differ.