How can I shrink a thin provisioned vmdk file?

Hi,

I want to shrink a thin provisioned vmdk file, because in the affected virtual machine OS there are many GBs free, but the thin provisioned disk is nearly the same size like a thick provisioned disk.

Regarding the VMware KB2004155, a SVMotion process to another datastore does not shrink the vmdk file.

I have a vSphere 6 environment with VMFS5 datastores only. So (I think) only a block size of 1MB is possible. Maybe this KB article is a little bit confusing.

Maybe somebody has a good ides how I can shrink a thin provisioned disk?

Thanks and Best Regards,

Andre