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Sparks79
Contributor
Contributor

Can A Compressed/Preallocated VM be Changed to an Expanding One

I am Using VmWare Workstation 14 Pro.

The VM is Ubuntu x64 18.04.01.

When I Created it I Chose a Fixed Size Disk ( 10gb ).

I May have been a bit Rushed in Doing this As I can see now that it is a Fixed Size and may not lend itself for Future Moving or other Works.

So I was wondering if it can be Changed Now Without Loosing any Status, or would I have to Start Afresh .

I am also interested in Creating an Image of this Installation for the purpose of Making a Clone of it to Put on Another Disk to Test it for Booting Naively on Another Machine.

However that may be Beyond the scope of this discussion and be best Posted Separately .

John

moderator edit by wila: moved from Workstation Player to Workstation Pro

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2 Replies
wila
Immortal
Immortal

Hi,

Welcome at the VMware communities forum.

You say:

When I Created it I Chose a Fixed Size Disk ( 10gb ).

and I reread your question 4 times and still don't understand exactly what you mean.

edit: Never mind, the hint is in your topic subject (do'h)

When you create a VM you always have to select a size for your virtual disk.

In the default workflow you can chose for either a virtual disk that is contained in a single file or -in my opinion the better choice- a disk that is made up of multiple files where each file contains a different slice of your virtual disk.

In the workflow where you setup a customized VM, there's a few more extra options.

I'm assuming you don't mean that you are using a physical disk or physical partition at your host.

Do you mean you created a preallocated disk?

If your VM is shut down and when there are no snapshots open on the VM, then you should be able to expand (grow) the virtual disk by going into "edit virtual machine settings" -> select Hard Disk you want to expand on the left -> click the "Expand Disk" button and change it to the size that you want.

This should work for any type of disk as long as you're not using a physical disk or partition at your host.

Be aware about the no snapshot requirement and that auto-protect snapshots can't be used either.

Preallocated disks can also be expanded without issues.

Note however that the Ubuntu OS won't use that new size from within just yet as within the guest OS you have to resize the partition for it to be able to see the increased size in Ubuntu.

hope this helps,

--

Wil

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva
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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

One option to change the virtual disk format is to use the vmware-vdiskmanager.exe command line utility that's located in the installation folder.

Steps could be:

  1. close VMware Workstation, or at least the VMs tab
  2. make sure that the VM does not have active snapshots
  3. clone the virtual disk to the desired format, e.g.
    vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -r Ubuntu-18.04.1.vmdk -t 1 clone.vmdk
  4. delete the original virtual disk file(s), or move it/them to another folder, and delete it later
  5. rename the previously cloned virtual disk to the original name
    vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -n clone.vmdk Ubuntu-18.04.1.vmdk

André

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