How to consolidate multiple virtual disks attached to a VM guest

vmware-esxi

I adopted a quirky environment. One of my DFS servers is a Windows Server 2003 Standard R2 server with:

  • (1) virtual drive for OS partition (C)
  • (1) virtual drive for temporary storage (F)
  • (5) virtual drives for file storage (E)

The (5) virtual drives are set up as a dynamic disk. I want to consolidate them into (1) virtual disk.

I have considered using dd_rescue by adding another virtual disk in the size that I need, then doing a bit-by-bit copy of my E drive, but I'm concerned it may have adverse effects on my DFS cache if the new drive doesn't take the E drive letter upon boot-up after I move the partitions. I'm also not sure if dd_rescue has any issues working with dynamic disks.

I've also considered doing a V-to-V, but that process could take a while to complete with 1.8TB of data total.

Is there a way I can consolidate the (5) virtual drives without the risk of corrupting my DFS? If so, how do I consolidate multiple virtual disks attached to a VM guest? (I'm running VMware vCenter/vSphere ESXi 5.5)

Best Answer

Well, with dynamic disks you've essentially stuck the drives together as far as Windows is concerned. There's no way that I know of to "combine" VMDK disks (at least, for separate disks ...ESXi does split disks for snapshots/independent disks on its own) - only expand/compact.

I'd imagine it was like this because of the 512 GB volume limit in VMFS3. VMFS5 goes up to 2 TB, so your best bet would be to create a new volume, attach it, then copy all the data over. If you're using DFS, that metadata carries over if you use a tool like robocopy to do the copying.

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