Increase/Decrease Disk Size

[K-MaC]

Hello all. I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts or feelings regarding increasing or decreasing of disks. The two options that I want to discuss are whether people are partial to increasing the size of the virtual disk and then use diskpart extend/shrink or whether it is better to create a new virtual disk of the size desired and copy the files to the new disk and then remove the old disk.

I am personally leaning towards the diskpart method simply because at some point the disks we will be assigning to users will become quite large and will take a long time to copy all the files over.

Other than having jitters about using diskpart can anyone see problems with what I want to do?

Thanks in advance.

Kevin

[wila]

Hi Kevin,

What VMware product are you using and what type of operating system do you have in mind?

Assuming you talk about ESX3.5 and post Windows XP windows guests.

The clone disk option is obviously the safest way, but if you use vmkfstools to clone the disk first / make a decent backup then I see no problem using diskpart.

You can also use a liveCD like bartPE with some tools like partition image, or use one of the specialized ilnux cd like system rescue cd to do this.

Using the "attach a disk temporarily to a helper VM" method is popular, but has issues with snapshots, see also

Also have a look at this page: http://www.vmware-land.com/Resizing_Virtual_Disks.html

So there's quite a number of options to choose from and most work just fine, but there's a few gotcha's as explained in the thread I referenced.

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Wil

[K-MaC]

Hey Wila, thanks for the reply. I am sorry I did not include more specific information about our setup here. You are correct. We currently have 16 HP BL360C with a 8TB Isilon 1920x for storage. The VMware environment is mostly ESX3.5 here with mainly XP/2003 guests. I am quite sure we are good to go with safe backups so I suppose there are many options available for us.

Thanks for your input.

Cheers

Kevin

[guyrleech]

I have never had any problems with Windows guests by extending the disk, booting into a WinPE ISO (built from AIK 1.1) and using diskpart to extend the partition to fill the new disk size. Since this is a Microsoft tool working on a Microsoft file system, I am confident to use it in production. I've never been entirely happy using thrid party tools to change partition sizes. Diskpart can be a pain though if you need to shrink partitions but I've only ever done that with physical machines.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Your post has been moved to the VI: Virtual Machine and Guest OS forum.

Dave Mishchenko

VMware Communities User Moderator

[wila · Accepted solution]

No worries I am glad it was of help to you. For shrinking I don't think you have much choice besides cloning to a new disk as vmkfstools doesn't support shrinking your disk since the ESX2.x days. Unless I missed something..

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Wil

[K-MaC]

Thanks everyone for your input. I agree that diskpart is pretty much useless for shrinking, that being said I highly doubt I will use it much if ever.

Cheers

Kevin