Is there any tool, command or a 3ed party product that will allow expanding a drive assigned to a Windows OS virtual machine running on ESX server without the need to shutdown the guest OS
that would be a nice to have wouldn't it? In order to expand the drive, in my experience, the VM has to be powered down.
Here is a good article on how to expand the disk, if you have any questions.
http://vmprofessional.com/index.php?content=2k3resize
Thank you for the article, the issue is as we are trying to implement VMware in production, having to schedule a downtime to expand a drive compared to not needing to do so with physical servers is becoming more of an issue with application owners.
Also this command don't seem to work for large disks, I had an error that disk is too large when I tried to expand a file share from 534gb to 700gb
hopefully someone in vmworld 2008 will offer a product that would help or VMware make this a feature enhancement
i've never had to expand a .vmdk that big. Check you block sizes on the luns and ensure they are alteast at 4MB
The issue with large disks is probably due to block size or the VMFS volume.
I don't believe that's the issue there, the disk is already larger than 512MB.
I've recreated a new LUN and moved the data to it in order to resolve expanding this drive. the new drive is set to 2mb block size. Should I expect any issues expanding this LUN again in the future being a 2MB block size LUN?
I attached a screen shut of the new lun info.
Thank you all for your reply.
Still hoping that a tool will be available to expand drives without powering off guest OS
I've recreated a new LUN and moved the data to it in order to resolve expanding this drive. the new drive is set to 2mb block size. Should I expect any issues expanding this LUN again in the future being a 2MB block size LUN?
Thank you all for your reply. Still hoping that a tool will be available to expand drives without powering off guest OS
I've recreated a new LUN and moved the data to it in order to resolve expanding this drive. the new drive is set to 2mb block size. Should I expect any issues expanding this LUN again in the future being a 2MB block size LUN?
Thank you all for your reply.
Still hoping that a tool will be available to expand drives without powering off guest OS
my advise to you is to add a LUN with 4MB block size. With a 2MB block size you will only be able to allocate no more than 512GB chunks at once.
1MB=256GB
2MB=512GB
4MB=1024GB
8MB= 2048GB
If you use a logical volume manager such as the windows Logical Disk Manager snap in or the Symantec Volume manager for storage within the Windows VM. You can increase the amount of disk allocated to a Windows VM without downtime. You just add an additional virtual disk to the VM, which under ESX can be done with the VM running. You can then extend the logical volume and filesystem on the fly to add the disk space using the logical volume manager within the VM.
RHCE, VCP
Blog: http://computing.dwighthubbard.info
To add a little bit more information. You can do this with dynamic disks under Windows with Disk Managment. If dynamic disks are supported for your configuration you can convert the disk and do as Dwight indicates.
How can I expand a vmdk in ESX while the VM is running, vmkfstools -X would require the VM to be powered down, is there another command that can be used?
No - the VM must be shutdown to use vmkfstools.
You might try creating a second disk, converting both to dynamic, and then spanning. Don't remember if that needs a restart or not, but I don't think anything else will work as you can't edit the drives in ESX while the VM is running.