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Highspeedlane
Contributor
Contributor

Provisioning additional virtual disk space

Hello,

 

I have VSphere esxi 4.1 and have one virtual Windows Server 2003 running on it. When setting it up I provisioned a thick 500Gb virtual disk. Can I provision more space for this Server 2003 hard disk from the VM store I have available? This option is greyed out on the settings portion of the virtual machine instance. There is plenty of available disk space to add to it if this is possible without recreating the virtual machine (?)

 

Thanks for any advice.

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

To increase the virtual disk size the VMFS datastore has to be formatted with the appropriate block size (see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1012384) and there must be no snapshots on the VM.

André

BTW: I deleted the other two duplicates of this post.

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am_7riel
Contributor
Contributor

i have the same issue with him

the disk provision is greyed out

the datastore has plenty of space,so it wont be an issue

i have even vmotion to another datastore,to ensure it was not due to datastorage issue

then i googled and this might due to server has snapshot on it

but i found out that even a snapshot is greyed out

i have compared with its similar server settings

but the option is not greyed out

same scsi bus setting

same thick provision setting

please help anyone

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

Can you confirm:

  • the VM has been cleanly powered off (not suspended)
  • the VM does not have any snapshots

If yes, please download the vmware.log as well as the .vmsd file from the VM's folder on the datastore and attach them to your next post.


André

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JDMils
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

The presence of a snapshot will not allow you to upgrade a disk. Delete the snapshot and you will find that the Disk Provisioning option will become available. Increase this to whatever size you need then boot the virtual server off the GParted 0.12 Live CD and increase the partition to fill the new disk allocation.

I use this method on all my Windows servers and it works 100% of the times.

| +-- JDMils | +-- ESXi 4.1.0, clustered hosts, HA, DRS & VMotion enabled. |
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am_7riel
Contributor
Contributor

Hi andre,

quite sure it was turned off,though it was from GUI. not from command line.

well,i will need to check that and keep it posted here.

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