Windows Drive spanning multiple VMDKs

[Rhone]

Thankfully, it's not the OS drive, but one of our test VMs has a data drive that spans two vmdk's and we'd like to merge them for obvious reasons. I found this which outlines the issue exactly, but the answers were fairly vague. Is there a process to accomplish this without third party tools or is that drive/data forever screwed? 

[mbufkin]

What OS are you running on the main drive? You might be able to use disk mirroring in Windows by adding a new virtual disk that gives enough room for both spans to be mirrored to then break the mirror after it finishes syncing using disk management. This is just a theory, I have not tested this in production.

[Rhone]

It's a Windows OS. I'd seen mirroring was suggested in the other post. I think i'll give it a try with a backup and see. It's a SQL server though so it may be another beast dealing with all the data dependencies. 

[AnaghB]

Hello @Rhone ,

I understand that you have data which is spread across 2 different VMDKs. Lets assume that you have 1 TB of Data which is scattered across 2 seperate VMDKs of 500 GB each. 

If you have to merge the 2 VMDKs then you will have to use 3rd party tool. Better use a simple solution.

Solution:

1. Create a new VMDK of 1 TB on the VM.

2. Copy the data from the old drive(scattered on 2vmdks) to the new created 1 TB drive from within the Windows OS. Its a copy paste option.

3. Once all the data is copied and verified then delete the old disk(scatterred on 2 vmdks) 

This is the easiest solution to your issue.