Dynamic expansion of Virtual Disk

[Vichu]

Hi,

I have couple of VMs which are running on ESX 3.5 environment. The question here is, How do I dynamically expand/add virtual disk to the VM when it requires ?. Is there any utility or API which does this operation?.

Any suggestions would be very much appreciated

[Vichu]

Any suggestion pls?

[admin]

You can use vmkfstools to expand the disk - note that this expands only the disk but not the volume/filesystem. If you are using a volume managers like LDM (windows) or LVM linux), it is easy enough to add a new disk / partition to the volume. If you are not, you may need to use a third party tool or convert your existing volumes to dynamic volumes.

Note that esx 3.5 supports thin disks, depending on your specific requirements, it might be useful to use thin disks for such cases.

-Sudarsan

[Vichu]

Thanks Sudharsan and Sorry for the belated reply...

I don't have privilege to login to ESX server and execute vmkfstools. My requirement is to achieve things using APIs.

[admin]

You can use VI sdk to add / modify disks - Checkout VI sdk's reconfigure function. If you need help,post in the VI sdk forum.

-Sudarsan