VSphere/ESX 4.0 Hot extend is currently supported only for vmfs flat virtual disks without snapshots opened in persistent mode

[pgiblin]

I am currently running a Microsoft Cluster on 2 Windows 2008 R2 VMs located on 2 seperate ESX 4.0 Hosts.  Shared storage is a NetApp using NFS DataStors except for the FC Quorum drive.

I am trying to increase the size of one of the shared cluster VMDK disks and receive this error: Hot extend is currently supported only for vmfs flat virtual disks without snapshots opened in persistent mode. Failed to extend disk scsi1:12.

I have no snapshots on this volume and when I go to the properties of the Virtual Disk the Mode area is greyed out.  In MSCS I have paused the standby node and taken the drive I want to resize offline.  I then went to the Edit Settings of the Standby VM and removed the virtual disk from that machine but did not remove it from disk.  I then went to Edit Settings of the Active node and attempted to resize the virtual disk but received a General System Error: Unknown Error message as well as the above mentioned error in the Events tab.

Am I missing something or is resizing not possible with this setup?

Any assistance is greatly appreciated.

PG

[rajeshcloud]

lets try with command mode by using vmkstools -X <disk size(20G)> /vmfs/volumes/<location vmdk file>

for example

[root@esxhost]# vmkfstools -X 8000m /vmfs/volumes/storage1/win2000/win2000.vmdk

[pgiblin]

Thanks for your quick response.

Unfortunately this is a production system and I will have to schedule any downtime or maintenance.  Is there just no way of doing this in the GUI...I am not real familiar with any command line operations.

Have you seen this error before?

PG

[a_p_]

According to http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_40_new_feat.html

Hot Extend for Virtual Disks —    This feature is supported for VMDK files on VMFS only (Hot Extend is not supported on NFS). ...

André

[pgiblin]

It is odd that I am able to do it on non – MSCS or standalone VMs.

Thank you.

Patrick Giblin

Message was edited by: a.p. - removed personal data from mail footer

[a_p_]

"Not supported" does not necessarily mean it does not work. It could be anything from not working over working with issues up to working but not tested.

André

[pgiblin]

After contacting tech support I was able to grow the disk by using the command line method but only after shutting both VM's down.  After bringing them both up, while Windows was seeing the new size the settings of the VM in VCenter still showed the old size.  Tech support was able to do a live reload of the VM configuration files to get VCenter to show the correct size.

Thanks for your help.