Security Analyst – Jeff Soehner CISSP, GXPN,GPYC,GMOB,GCIH

I wanted to tell my readers about a great tool I found from those creative people at Quest Software called vOptimizer. This tool is an essential part of any virtual administrators toolbox.

You start by connecting to your ESXi server and create a Project. This project will use a boot ISO uploaded by the windows client wizard during initialization and it will allow you to run a disk optimization that can do things like removing old temp files all the way to resizing your VM disk!

We started by connecting to a Windows 2003 VM on our ESXi 5 server that was grossly oversized at 40G. This project was setup to remove every excess file (including removing the swap file) and once we had successfully ran the disk optimizer we were left with a running server that was only about 11G in size. The entire process only took about 40 minutes of downtime.

We checked the ESXi summary before it was completed (left) and after (right).

Now I used to run a gparted iso and change the size of the disk and then expand the NTFS partition to make a disk larger but this trick allows you to make it bigger or smaller.

Unfortunately is does not work for LVM disks and with most of the Linux distros moving towards this default installation we are still looking to resolve this issue (gparted still doesn’t support it either).

(BTW this tool cannot optimize a VM if there is a snapshot so you will need to back it up first and then remove the snapshot before you can run the optimizer. This is true for windows vms as well).

After 30 days this tool will run as a free tool and only optimize 2 VMs but it is still a handy tool to have in your toolbox.