How to reclaim Disk Space using Vmware Thin provisioning

If your drive is thick provisioned
You will need to use either Vmware Tools, Shrink or sdelete

 (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897443) to zero out unused disk space.

Vmware tools Shrink

 

Sdelete

 

Then migrate to a new datastore.

Note: there is currently an issue where you will need to migrate to a new datastore with different block size.

If your drive is already thin provisioned

Vmware Tools Shrink isn’t available.

You will need to use sdelete to zero out disk then migrate to new datastore.

Warning: using sdelete will expand the thin provisioned disk to it’s full provisioned size so make sure you have enough space on the datastore free.

Note: there is currently an issue where you will need to migrate to a new datastore with different block size.