Linked Clones strategy? Can't grow C drive

[PolishPaul]

So i just ran into an issue with my linked clones where I didn't set my system drive C: large enough and now I can't grow it since its a snapshot/linked clone. All new clones are now stuck with a 40GB drive that i can't expand. Could anyone suggest a strategy for setting up linked-clones so i can avoid this problem in the future?

• Should i provision the template with a very large drive so the clones can grow as large as they want?
• Now that i'm out of space, what would you suggest to add space to the system drive on the linked clone?
• Should i just image the machine, redo the setup with larger drives and restore?

I'm interested in how others are going about this or any best practices that can be recommended.

[a_p_]

Unfortunately there's no way to resize a virtual disk with snapshots (linked clones are snapshots). If you need to resize the base disk, you first need to delete all the snapshots/linked clones.

To avoid this is the future, you may choose a larger size for the base disk/template. With the default sparse virtual disk format VMware Workstation uses, this will not result in a much larger base disk, but the clones can grow up to the provisioned size.

André