Comments on: Expanding a virtual VMware disk

By: Paul Evans

Paul Evans — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 05:15:09 +0000

Thanks for an insightful post, Michael. Judging by the activity on the comments, you have seeded a lively community around this topic.

You should download and try fatVM http://www.gudgud.com/fatvm

fatVM is a reliable, robust, and safe, 1-click solution for extending the C drive of your VMware Fusion or Workstation virtual disk that is becoming full.
* It provides a simple, intuitive, interface and a reliable process that hides the technical complexity of extending a virtual disk.
* It is robust because it can extend virtual disks having snapshots and clones.
* It is safe because it preserves your original disk, which remains available to you for when the need ever arises.

Thanks

By: R1440_CO

R1440_CO — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 05:26:03 +0000

If you are using Windows 2008, you can simply edit the disk and make it larger in VMWare.

Start the server, go into disk management, and extend the C volume to the extra disk! Done. One nice thing about 2008 server.

By: Petr

Petr — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:39:19 +0000

You saved a lot time. Thanks for the nice manual – it went smoothly on my laptop.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:56:18 +0000

vdv is awesome! I was getting that same error and now I understand why. Now that I understand the reason, I am glad for it. In the past, if you forgot to clean out your snapshots before expanding a disk, you would revert to an earlier snapshot. That was really bad! It would be nice if the error message said ‘you must clean out your snap shots’ instead of ‘general error’ – but hay, I will take it!

By: Slavi

Slavi — Sun, 10 May 2009 20:11:08 +0000

I am receiving a strange error:
Diskpart failed to extend the volume.
Please make sure the volume is valid for extending…

By: vdv

vdv — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 07:37:54 +0000

I solve problem. I remove all snapshots!

By: vdv

vdv — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 06:11:50 +0000

Hi! help me. I’ve a ESX sever 3.5 and few virtual station with Windows server 2003. I want to expand size hard disk on VM, but I can’t. This is what I’m doing in VMware Infrastructure Client:
- Select a VM
- Click on Edit Settings under Commands
- On the Hardware tab, select Hard Disk [x]. Observe the text box next to New Size: and that it is possible to enlarge this size. Add a few GB and select OK.
- I get an error like the following:

—————————-
Error
—————————
A general system error occurred: Internal error
—————————
OK
—————————

At other times it will look like the disk has been resized, but going back into the Edit Settings dialogue simply shows the original size again.

Any ideas?
P.S.
But in the other VM I can change size!

By: My Portal Project » Blog Archive » My Virtualized Ubuntu Experience (VirtualPC vs VMWare)

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 21:14:30 +0000

[...] One piece of advice: I only allocated 3GB to my mage and that quickly filled up. You can increase the size of your VMWare image through a simple command line that is detailed here. [...]

By: RockOn

RockOn — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 02:35:53 +0000

Ran command: vmware-vdiskmanager -x 10GB myDisk.vmdk and then in Vista used the disk manager to extend to use newly allocated space and it all worked!

By: John Croson

John Croson — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 21:31:17 +0000

Excellent. Saved me 45 minutes!

By: Odds and Ends | The Sales Engineer

Odds and Ends | The Sales Engineer — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 04:49:57 +0000

[...] base image you’d rather just expand what you have. No longer to you have to go through this old methodical process. Now you can use VMware Converter to do it for you through the UI. Very slick! (why this [...]

By: KYovev

KYovev — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 16:05:32 +0000

Hey there.
Looks like there are a lot of people fasing same problems with disk sizes in VMWare.
Here are my simple few steps for resizing the bootable disk in a virtual machine running win 2003.:
My server info:
HP DL 360 running VMWare ESX Server 3i
HP MSA StorageWorks 2012i containing all system and data volumes.
Here is it:
1. Make sure you have enough free disk space to add later to the VM.
2. Shut Down the virtual machine.
3. Delete all snapshots of it.
4. Using VM Infrastructure Client right click the VM you want to edit and click Edit Settings.
5. Click on Hard Disk 1 and in the right pane increase the size of the disk.
6. Hit OK and Power ON the VM.
7. Now use a partition manager of your choise to add the unallocated disk space to your disk.
8. Enjoy

By: VBScab

VBScab — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 12:37:43 +0000

I found that theUtmost’s instructions were spot-on. However, I wanted the simplest method possible which would allow me to retain my snapshots. In summary, I cloned the latest snapshot then imported the resulting VM.

Needless to say, EVERYTHING was copied somewhere safe first (to another disk, in my case), including the clone after it was created – I’m paranoid, what can I say?

By: ElMehdi

ElMehdi — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 09:55:47 +0000

Hello,
For VMware, the extend may be done in different ways. The easiest scenario is when we want to expend non OS drive; for windows the diskpart do it smootly after extending the vmdk; for OS drives, I always use gparted without any problem.
to extend the vmdk, I use vmware-vdiskmanager.exe for workstation version, and vmkfstools for ESX; note that the path must not contain spaces (c:\toto\my vmdk file.vmdk) in this case don’t forget the double quotes “.
I wrote an post about that (sorry but in French) with a video demo if you want to see (http://www.ntsysv.com/index.php/tutoriel-video-extension-du-disque-systeme-machine-virtuelle-windows-2003)

By: SpittingCAML » VMware - expanding a virtual disk

SpittingCAML » VMware - expanding a virtual disk — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 19:20:10 +0000

[...] The brilliant 4sysops.com blog goes into more detail on the topic, but it is something I will be using lots in the future!… well until I can be bothered to install VMware converter, but I don’t know enough about that product to install it on our corporate servers. [...]

By: marcellin NG

marcellin NG — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 18:18:41 +0000

Guys,
Please follow suggestion#24. It is so easy, and it worked for me on VM Wkstn 6.5.0.
Basically what it does is it makes a copy of your virtual machine to a new one by giving you the option to change the size of the virtual disk throughout the process.

Just make sure you **DESELECT the default option “import all disks and maintain size” and select “select volumes and resize to save or add space” option.

The rest is a piece of cake just logical stuff you can’t go wrong.
Even if you did, you would have backed up your virtual machine anyway.
The wizard is available from the File menu of the VMware wkstn.
Best of luck,
Marcellin_NG

By: Jim Nickel

Jim Nickel — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 07:16:59 +0000

The easiest way that lets you resize is stated several times in this list.

The new 3.5 of ESX lets you increase the disk from inside the Virtual Center GUI. Or use the vmkfstools as this article suggests. Then just boot off the gparted iso and resize the disk. You need to remember to pick the right disk inside the gparted to resize and make sure you click the Apply button.

It does it’s thing and forces a chkdsk which you should let happen.

Voila…your virtual NTFS disk is bigger.

Jim

By: David Faure

David Faure — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 23:50:13 +0000

Well it’s just an NTFS filesystem, it doesn’t matter which OS runs the tool that resizes it
Linux’s ntfsresize works fine on Windows NTFS partitions.

But I was wrong. With VMWare Converter 3.0.3 I was able to resize a VM without any trouble, the NTFS filesystem was automatically resized by the converter.

By: Peter

Peter — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 17:40:50 +0000

Not sure how you would use a Linux utility to resize a Windows VMware virtual disk.

By: David Faure

David Faure — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 14:42:47 +0000

Peter (comment #42) — you need to use ntfsresize to enlarge the filesystem, as explained in http://weblogs.asp.net/kdente/archive/2006/01/07/434789.aspx, I think.