When Enough is not Enough… Virtual Disk Space That Is.
Recently a friend and a colleague asked me if I knew how to resize a virtual machine disk. The answer was no because I allocate almost as much space on a virtual disk as I would on a real machine and had never run into the problem of low disk space.
But that got me thinking about the subject and the very possibility that I may one day need to do the very same thing. So I grabbed my handy dandy notebook where I have a development environment for web, applications and virtualization.
My first reaction was to to look at the virtual server web GUI. Surely they would have built in some tools to perform this action. But after a little looking, determined that its not part of the core virtualization platform. Which in this case is VMWare Server 2.0 on Vista.
So then I went to VMWare Virtual Machine Converter. Having converted many physical machines into virtual machines. I figured there has to be a way to use virtual machine converter to solve this problem.
Bingo.. Bango.. or what ever you want to shout!!!
Virtual Machine Converter has the capabilities to do this without a problem.
Obviously there are many way to do this… No one method is right nor wrong for resizing an existing Virtual Hard Disk. Here is how I resized an existing virtual machine hard disk using Virtual Machine Converter…
PRE-VIRTUAL HARD DISK RESIZING PROCESS PROCEDURE AND ACTIONS:
- Always make sure you have a good backup of your virtual machine
- Stating the obvious. Make sure before you begin the process, that you have a battery backup on both the Virtual Server Appliance and the workstation from which you may perform the operation below
- Patience and Time
OK lets look at the simplest method of resizing your Virtual Hard Disk on your Virtual Machine.
Method 1: How to Use VMWare Virtual Machine Converter to Resize a Virtual Hard Disk:
- Gracefully turn off / power down your virtual machine;
- Open the VMWare Converter application on your Laptop/Desktop (May be same device as the virtual server/machine host);
- Open the VMWare Converter wizard;
- Select ’standalone virtual machine’ as the source and destination system;
- Choose ‘Select volumes and resize to save or add space’;
- Enter a new desired size and voilá, you’re done!
CAUTION: This process can be time consuming and it purely depends on the Virtual Disks being resized and also the capabilities of the Physical hardware. Also note that you may need to reinstall the VMWare tools are the resizing of a Virtual Hard Disk.
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