If you’ve built a VMware VM but forgotten to turn off LVM and therefore cant use vmware virtual toolbox to shrink your disks you can still perform a virtual shrink by filling up your vm vmdks with 0’s !
$ dd if=/dev/zero bs=40M count=40 of=1
$ dd if=/dev/zero bs=40M count=40 of=2
$ dd if=/dev/zero bs=40M count=40 of=3
$ dd if=/dev/zero bs=40M count=40 of=4
$ dd if=/dev/zero bs=40M count=40 of=5
etc etc
$ rm 1 2 3 4 5
This didnt affect the 11G of space used by my vm vmdk disks but it did reduce the tgz of the entire vm from 5.5G to 3.3G !
