Expand or Increase The Size of VMWare ESX Virtual Hard Disk

[Syed Shahzad Ali]

• Symptoms
• Solution 1
• Solution 2
• Solution 3

Symptoms

• Virtual hard disk (10GB) on EXS server is full
• Increased size of the hard drive to 30 GB for example via the VMWare Virtual Infrastructe client
• Guest operating system still shows drive is full
• Admin Tools --> Computer Management --> Disk Management shows 10 GB NTFS partition
• There is an unallocated partition of 20GB availble
• But this cannot be expanded by Windows 2003 on the fly
• Or cannot be merged with the existing 10GB partition

Solution 1

• This solution is valid for Windows 2003 and Windows XP
• There is a command line utility called DISKPART that can expand the size of the volume of virtual hard drive.
• This solution is little bit difficult so try to avoid it

Solution 2

• This is based on Knoppix based utility called QTParted
• This solution is little bit tricky as well

Solution 3

• This is the method that worked easily and effectively for our lab environment needs
• This is based on VMWARE free utility called VMConverter
• You can install VMWare Converter Standalone Client on the VMWare Virtual Image itself
• Run the tool and change the partition size