What would be the "Best practice" in terms of adding harddrive space to your Vcenters C:\ Drive?

[dedricstarks]

Q: What would be the "Best practice" in terms of adding harddrive space to your Vcenter's C:\ drive

Currently, I am of the opinion that it would be best to clone my existing Vcenter server, renaming it, and making it live , followed by shutting down vcenter using vcenter2, edit the setting on vcenter 1 and power back on....could be the only way that i am aware of.  (since you have to have the VM pwred off in order to edit harddisk space) ... Any other ideas would be much appreciated....

[Alistar]

Hi there,

this is not true at all! Just edit VM settings while the VM is live, increase the c:\ drive space, confirm the change, launch diskmgmt.msc back in the Windows VM and then just select Expand... on the C:\ drive and expand the partition to all available space (just click Next, Next, Next...) - also, you can save some space by moving the swapfile to another drive, for example a 20GB 😧 partition

[dedricstarks]

well here's the thing .. I've already tried to do that ... i'm using Vcenter 4.1.2 here. Sadly, the option to change the provisioned space while the vm is running is grayed out... 😕

[Alistar]

Oh well damn.. can't this be done even with the VM shut down? I mean the outage would be 15-30 minutes maximum. Of course backing up the current VM first would be a sane thing to do but... the export-import strategy seems pretty cumbersome, but if really there is no other way... I only have experience in vSphere 5.x so if this won't work then I guess I'm out of bullets 😕

[dedricstarks]

Thank you for trying though still appreciated ...:)

[Alistar]

Thank you I still hope you can do the expansion with the least effort possible

[a_p_]

>>> Sadly, the option to change the provisioned space while the vm is running is grayed out..

Does the vCenter Server VM have active snapshots? And which Windows Server version do you currently use?

To find out whether the VM has active snapshots, take a look at the Snapshot Manager, and if there are no Snapshots present, also check whether the VM's folder on the datastore contains <vmname"-00000x.vmdk file(s).

André

[dedricstarks]

no, no snapshots ...I am running it on 2008 x64 R2 ..

[a_p_]

That's unusual. What's the VM's virtual disk (.vmdk) file name that shows up in the VM's HDD settings?

André

[dedricstarks]

its listed as the same name of the vcenter server ie; vcenter-<domainname>.vdmk_00002  , its 4.1 .. .so i'm just going to free up some space on the hard drive here (delete some temp files etc)  and talk to the client about upgrading to 5.5 ...

[a_p_]

>>> vcenter-<domainname>.vdmk_00002

The name you mentioned looks like a name of a snapshot. Don't only rely on the Snapshot Manager, a VM may run on active snapshots even though there are no snapshots listed.

Depending on the free disk space on the datastore, the provisioning type (thin/thick), and the size /number of existing snapshots you may create a new snapshot and then click "Delete All" in the Snapshot Manager to get rid of all existing snapshots (i.e. merge the data in the snapshot files into the base virtual disk). If you are unsure, please post a screenshot of the datastore browser window, which shows all the VM's files with their sizes, and let me know how much free disk sapce you have on the datastore

André

[vNEX]

just in addition to a.p. comment regarding active snapshots that are missing from snapshot manager below are some useful sources I would recommend you to read:

VMware KB: Committing snapshots when there are no snapshot entries in the Snapshot Manager

VMware KB: Determining if there are leftover delta files or snapshots that VMware vSphere or Infrast...

VMware KB: Delete all Snapshots and Consolidate Snapshots feature FAQ

VMware KB: Troubleshooting issues when creating or committing snapshots in VMware ESXi/ESX