VMware - Increasing the size of a virtual disk

Important information before you begin

Even though following the sections in this article provide steps to increase the size of your virtual disk, the size of the disk partition does not increase as observed inside the guest operating system. You must follow steps related to your specific operating system to increase the size of the disk partition(s). For more information, see Increasing the size of a disk partition (1004071).

Caution: VMware recommends that you back up your virtual machine before increasing the size of a virtual disks.

In all cases, confirm the following before increasing the size of the virtual disk:

• All snapshots have been removed.
• The virtual machine is powered off.

The procedure for increasing the size of a virtual disk differs between VMware products. Follow the section below that matches your product.

Instructional Notes

To follow the sections below, you may need to:

· Open a command or shell prompt.

· Navigate to the VMware application's installation directory.

· Locate the full path to a hosted virtual machine's virtual disk (.vmdk) file.

· Replace any reference to xxx.vmdk with the full path to the virtual machine's virtual disk.

Note: If you have multiple .vmdk files with the same base name, use the file that does not include -flat or -s0 in its file name.

Workstation / ACE Manager / Server / GSX

1. Open a command prompt.
2. Navigate to the product's installation directory.
3. Type vmware-vdiskmanager -x 100Gb xxx.vmdk and press Enter.
   
   Note: Replace 100Gb with the actual size of virtual disk that you want. You can also specify Kb and Mb .

VMware Player / ACE Instance

It is not possible to directly change the size of a virtual machine's virtual disk if VMware Player is being used or if it is an ACE Instance.

Alternatives to directly changing the size of a virtual disk from one of these VMware products:

· An ACE Instance's virtual disk size must be changed from the ACE Manager, and then repackaged and redeployed.

· A VMware Player's virtual disk size must be changed from a different VMware product.