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Epistimonas
Contributor
Contributor

Datastore Increase

Hello all,

I am trying to expand a drive on one of our VM's. I have expanded the Datastore and the size is reported correctly however under disk provisioning, I am not able to increase the size:

2021-03-14_20h13_39.png

2021-03-14_20h14_09.png

 

 

2021-03-14_20h19_30.png

2021-03-14_20h15_58.png

 

Any ideas?

16 Replies
TWalker99
Contributor
Contributor

Hi,

also having a similar problem on ESXi 5.5

We have added the hard disks, extended the Datastore, added the space to the virtual disk but cannot access the space to extend the disk on the Win2016 server, would like to shrink the virtual disk and the datastore and make a new datastore and new disk.

any advice greatly appreciated.

 

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bryanvaneeden
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Hi @Epistimonas  ,

Do you have any snapshots on the VM? By the looks of it you do seem to have an environment higher than 5.5 since you already have more than 2TB in filesize for the VM disk. So this should work.

@TWalker99 Not sure what your issue is, but remember that before ESXi 5.5 the max limit for a VMDK was 2TB if you are using VMFS 5 and up.

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TWalker99
Contributor
Contributor

Hi @bryanvaneeden 

We had 2 datastores, 1 x 1TB, 1 x 3TB, we have added 5TB to the 3TB datastore and increased the virtual disk from 1.5TB to 7TB in the VM settings.

Clearly from your comments ESXI 5.5 won't support this, how can I roll this back and return the disk back to it's original size?

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bryanvaneeden
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Hi @TWalker99 I edited my post, I forgot to write an additional comment that 2TB was the max if using VMFS3. Sorry for that.

Clearly if you have a 7TB VMDK it works :). 

Shrinking a disk cannot be done easily. Only with VMware Converter or just creating a new (smaller) disk and migrating everything from inside the GuestOS. That is why I always advice to size your environment small(er) instead of starting large. 

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TWalker99
Contributor
Contributor

Hi @bryanvaneeden,

Ahh OK thanks, the problem I have though is that the OS (Windows 2016) will not let me access the additional space, it shows it, but I can't extend the existing disk, nor create new disks.

I'm wondering if this is more likely to be a Windows issue than a VMWare issue.
[EDIT]
it is - the disk is set as MBR so it is limited to 2TB.
I think the only routes forward are to convert the MBR to GPT or to remove the extra space from the existing disk.

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Epistimonas
Contributor
Contributor

@continuumsorry for tagging you on this, any ideas?

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TWalker99
Contributor
Contributor

@Epistimonas 

apologies for hijacking your thread.

Have you checked that the virtual machine doesn't have any active snapshots? I've had that be a problem in the past.

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Epistimonas
Contributor
Contributor

No worries, no there are no snapshots. The problem that you're referring to is where the section to resize is greyed out. 

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fabio1975
Commander
Commander

Ciao 


I took a look at the images and from what I see the volume on which the disk of the VM you want to expand is Raid6Data but from what I see it has only 1 MB free ... or do I see wrong? If you don't have space on the datastore you can't expand the VM disk

 

Fabio 

Fabio

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Epistimonas
Contributor
Contributor

Hi Fabio, no you're reading that wrong. I have already expanded the datastore to 9.8TB but the VM does no "see" the available space, hence my post.

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fabio1975
Commander
Commander

Ok 

Ok, so you can't expand the VMDK or volume size inside the Guest OS?
I'm sorry but the pictures have misled me.

 

Fabio

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Epistimonas
Contributor
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@fabio1975can't even resize it outside the GuestOS while in Vsphere client

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fabio1975
Commander
Commander

Ok so you can not enlarge the VMDK, sorry if I return to the question of the datastore but from this image you posted I see that only 1 MB are free:

fabio1975_4-1615930726894.png

fabio1975_5-1615930726895.png

 

So I am correct that you are unable to expand the VMDK, as you point out in this other image:

 

fabio1975_6-1615930726897.png

The maximum size is the maximum size that the vmdk can become.

what other vm are there in the datastore Raid6Data? and what is the size of the disks of these VMs?

Fabio

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bryanvaneeden
Hot Shot
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Hi @Epistimonas ,

@fabio1975 is actually right. I didn't notice that earlier but your datastore is actually full right now. It has 1MB free space.

Your VM has 4.75TB (which is 4.864GB) which is the maximum the VMDK can be since the datastore is full.

You will have to clear out the datastore to be able to give the VM more space.

I hope this helped.

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Epistimonas
Contributor
Contributor

@bryanvaneeden @fabio1975 

Appreciate the replies from everyone. Let me make this clearer.

1. this is local storage

2. before I physically added 6x 900GB SAS drives on the server, that datastore was 4.8TB. So the VMDK was 4.8TB.

3. After adding the storage, I expanded the datastore to the max available size, 9.8TB.

4. The datastore had increased to 9.8TB as you can see from the pictures. The VMDK has also expanded to whatever the max was.

the issue:

I cannot "see" that extra storage under disk provisioning on the client nor I can see it inside the Guest OS.

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bryanvaneeden
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Hi @Epistimonas ,

Your VMDK was 4.8TB and still is 4.8TB as far as I can see from the screenshots. You cannot increase it because the datastore itself has no free space left (1MB).

Like I said earlier, what else is on the datastore except for this VM? There must be something that is using all of the free space you added. Since the disk for the VM isn't larger than 4.8TB, you cannot see more space inside the GuestOS.

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