Reconfigure guests, what first...

[Davek0974]

Hi all,

I need to reconfigure some of my guests but not sure what's first.

Esxi client events is telling me I need more video ram in all my vm's, not sure why or if it's really needed but at least it's easy to do. None of the guests have direct users, most are just admin consoles, one is rds session hosts, does video ram affect rds sessions?

I also need to enlarge a virtual disk, I underestimated when building the vm, is a snapshot sufficient safety or sould I copy the vim files first in case it goes a bit wrong? The guest is w2008r2, would that have the required partition tweaking tools in it?

I also need to reduce ram allocation a bit in the rds vim as I have allocated 16gb but it's only tickling a tiny portion of that, but again that's an easy tweak.

Any thoughts?

Thanks

Dave

[a_p_]

One reason to add more video RAM to a server VM would be if you consider to switch to the WDDM drivers, to not end up with a black console window. For remote sessions the video RAM is not important.

In order to resize a virtual disk there must be no active snapshots. So if you want to be on the safe side, you'd need to take a backup. However, resizing a virtual disk is usually not an issue. With Windows 2008 R2 you can - after resizing the virtual disk - grow the partition in the disk manager GUI.

André

[shijimol]

You could resize your disk  using vmware  convertor also

[aravinds3107]

Which Drive are you going to extend? if you planning to perform C drive bettet take a backup, In Windows 2008 R2 you can extend using disk management GUI.

To reduce the memory you have to shutdown the VM to reduce if you do not have HOT Add feature enabled

[Davek0974]

Yes it's the c drive of the rds session host, I need to add another 50 gb or so, I have had good luck in increasing drives before in physical boxes so hopefully it will go the same, making them smaller however never went so good!

I will make a copy of the vm files first I think.

Thanks for the quick answers.

Ill likely leave the video ram, btw what is wddm?

[a_p_]

When you say "the C: drive", does this mean you do have other partitions on the same virtual disk? The above mentioned "easy way" will only work when you resize the last partition on the virtual disk (with the adjacent free disk space). Resizing other partitions may require 3rd party tools.

Ill likely leave the video ram, btw what is wddm?

It's a graphics driver, which might be helpful in case of sluggish mouse movements in the guest's console on e.g. Windows 2008 R2.

see http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/kb/1016770

André

[Davek0974]

No, luckily this vm only has one vdisk and one partition on it.

Ill look into the wddm thing.

Dave