I get a lot of questions of students and customers about resizing a virtual disk. This is the reason for this blog. The following procedure will guide you step by step through the process of resizing (increasing) a disk of a virtual machine. Before you make virtual hardware changes be sure you have taken a full backup of the virtual machine.  

NOTE: If you do not want any troubles only increase the disk size. Decreasing can cause loss of data.  

Flow

Increase Disk using diskpart

Step 1: Edit the virtual machine settings and increase the size of the disk (VMDK).

 Step 2: Open the console of this virtual machine and start a command prompt.

Step 3: Start diskpart and execute following steps.

list volume à this gives you a list of the available partitions

select volume x à select the partition number you want to increase

extend à this will add the empty disk space into the partition. Now the partition has increased in size.

NOTE: On Windows 2008 this can be done via the Device Manager / Storage, but I have seen some weird things like showing incorrect partition sizes.  

Increase Disk using Third Party tool

Since I have some great experiences with the Acronis Disk Director tool I will explain the steps to increase a disk using this tool. Another tool that can be used is e.g. GParted.

Step 1: Be sure you have a boot image (ISO) of the Acronis Disk Director Tool that supports your guest OS.

Step 2: Boot your virtual machine using the boot image ISO. Use the ESC button during booting your virtual machine to activate the "one time boo menu"

Step 3: Select the partition you want to increase and right mouse click on it. Then select "Resize Volume"

Step 4: Increase the disk space of the selected partitions by decreasing the unallocated space to 0

Step 5: After increasing the partition you have to commit the changes.

Step 6: Now you need to reboot your virtual machine after disconnecting the boot image.

In the near future I will blog about this new release in a sort of “How to” format to introduce the new features.

The suite consists out of following products.

VMware vSphere 5.0         

 VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.0

VMware vSphere Storage Appliance 1.0

vShield App 5.0 with Data Security

VMware vCloud Director 1.5

A new product most of the time means, a new set of licenses.  VMware moved from 6 different licenses to 5, they removed the Advanced license.  Lucky for the owners of this license (with a active subscription, they will be migrated to Enterprise.  Look here for the license paper

Here a list of vSphere 5 introduction links

VMware Cloud Infrastructure: http://www.vmware.com/cloud-infrastructure/

The Console Blog: VMware Unveils vSphere 5 and the Cloud Infrastructure Suite

NTPRO: http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/

Kendrickcolemand: vCenter 5 - To Appliance or Not?, Using VMware AutoDeploy for ESXi

YellowBricks.com Live BLogging, vSphere 5.0 Clustering technical deepdive

UP2V: http://up2v.nl/

VmwareTips: VMware 2011 Mega Launch

Virtual Geek: Raising the Bar V = vSphere 5!

CRN VMware Adds Virtual Machine-Based Licensing In vSphere 5

vTexan: really cool things in vSphere5

A customer of us called me with a weird problem with a Template which was converted back to a Virtual Machine.  See here the problem which occurs when the customer wanted to edit the settings of this VM.

The cause of this problem is that an ISO was mounted from a datastore which does not exist anymore. 

To solve this problem, just connect to the ESX host where the VM is registered on.  Edit the setting here and put the CDROM on “Client Device”. 

Then check on which datastore the VM is located.  Then unregister and register the VM again in the ESX host.  Now you are able again to edit the setting of this VM via vCenter

During a migration process from ESX to ESXi at a customer site we had a problem removing a server from the vCenter inventory.

We checked the permissions on this server and we saw that the user who wanted to remove the server was admin on datacenter level.  Here the screen we got.

Knowing there is a PowerCLI command to remove a ESXi host from the vCenter, we walked that way with success.

I used this PowerCLI script to remove this server from the inventory after moving the server out of the cluster to the datacenter level.

Connect-VIServer  vCenterServer

Remove-VMHost "HostThatCannotBeRemovedViaGui" –confirm:$false

Disconnect-VIServer –confirm:$false