How do I create a new VMDK from free space

[chmouse]

I have 4 VM on one host.  One of the the VM is running out of space and it is an exchange 2010 server.

I have max out the 256GB default.

I have approx 300GB of free disk space left on datastore1.

How can I use part of the 300GB of free space and create me a new virtual disk?

Can I also then extend my Exchange VM over the newly create virtual disk?

Thanks

[Troy_Clavell]

you'll need a bigger block size on your LUN.  The biggest single HDD a 1MB block LUN can support is 256.   The only way to change the block size is to remove the LUN for inventory, then adding it back and formatting the LUN with a bigger block size.  ( I would recommend 8MB)

[chmouse]

Troy,  Thanks for the quick reply.  More questions.

If I do that, do I have to install all the VMs from scratch again?

[Troy_Clavell]

if you have other LUNs and Storage vMotion, you can evacuate all guests off the LUN in question then delete it and add it back with the new block size.

[MauroBonder]

Tip: How best practice keep ~20% of LUN or more of free space. To possible snapshot and future grown of vmdk.

[chmouse]

This is not great.  NO way for me to plug in more drives.

I did not installed this host.  I inherited this when I took the job, now it is up to me to fix it.

There is more than 20% disk space for snapshots.

[Troy_Clavell]

you are still bound to the small block size. You can always present another 256GB HDD to the guest if that helps?

[a_p_]

Depending on your Exchange setup, you could add another virtual disk to the VM and then migrate some of the Exchange data to it!?

André

[afertmann]

If you don't have Storage vMotion you have 2 options:

1) Power down the VMs and copy the VMs over to a new datastore.  Remove the VM from inventory and then readd it to inventory from the destination datastore.

2) Do a V2V migration of the VM using Converter.  Since this is an Exchange box and probably gets a lot of traffic, you'll still probably want to stop the exchange services so data change during the V2V migration is low.

Unfortunatly both of these require downtime.

If you have a nice VMware sales rep, see if they can give you a trial vSphere Enterprise Key.  You would be evaulating if you wanted to migrate your keys to Enterprise.

Hope this helps.

-Alex

[chmouse]

Thanks guys.  Looks like I got very limited option