Extending a Virtual Machine Partition

[TSPPNPF]

Hello,

I am running VMware ESX 3.0.1. I have a Virtual Machine that has a 6 Gig C: drive which is the system drive. I have a mounted drive of 10 Gig. No drive letter assigned. I want to extend or increase the space on the C: drive. Is there any way to extend this partition or should I just span the volume? If there is a way to extend the C: drive how can I do it?

[kharbin]

Sounds like you have 10GB VMDK, with only a 6GB partiton within it? Extend it the same way as a physical. Install partiton manager or similar utility and simply extend the partiton until it takes all 10GB.

Ken Harbin

www.esXpress.com

[TSPPNPF]

Thanks for the helpful answer. That is what I was thinking, but I wanted to be sure.

Thanks again.

[jayolsen]

If you want to extend the existing vmdk 6gb file you would use vmkfstools commandline to do so. So to make the 6gb disk named disk.vmdk extend to 10gb you would enter

vmkfstools -X 10G disk.vmdk

Then you could resize the partition with 3rd party software.

[Bart_Verbruggen]

If it is a windows OS, there is no need to use a 3th party software. Mount your disk to a helper windows machine and use diskpart.exe to extend your partition.

[ctfoster]

You can easily expand the size of a vmdk file using command line tools. The general form of the command is

vmkfstools -X xxG where xxG is the new size of the vmdk i/e vmkfstools-X 30G to have a vmdk fo 30gb.

You then need to use the appropriate utility to expand the OS partition into the newly created space.

In your situation to get round the limitations of diskpart working with Windows systems disks simply copy the extended vmdk and add

the disc to another Virtual Machine running the same version of Windows. You can then use diskpart to extend the volume

and check whether you can see the new space. When you are happy with it you can replace the original copy.

It's always best to work on a copy. Nice and risk free and needs no third party tools.

[jhanekom]

As you've discovered, there are numerous ways of extending the disk size, but extending the system disk on a Windows server (whether virtual or physical), is a bit more challenging.

A thread that discusses this very well and provides several possible solutions: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/92619