My Own ESXi Server Part 17 Increasing Size of Virtual Disk

At some point, you will run into a situation where one of your disks is running a bit low on space, and you want to increase to accommodate future growth.

How to Increase Size of Disk:

1)  Using VMware Sphere Client, right-click on the virtual machine you want to increase the disk size and click Edit Settings.

2)  Select Hard Disk.  Adjust the size of the disk and click OK.

3)  That's it from the VMware perspective!  The next step is for the guest operating system to reflect the change in disk size.  To do so, you will need some partitioning software that supports your operating system.  To continue with this example, we will increase the partition size of a Windows 2003 system using the open source software GParted.

As I already had a burned copy of GParted, I will need to boot from the CD.  To get the virtual machine to boot from the CD, I need to make one change to the bios.  Still in the Edit Settings, switch to the Options tab.  Select Boot Options, and check Force BIOS Setup and click OK.

4)  When the virtual machine is booted next, change the boot option to ensure it boots from the CD.

5)  If bios change was done correctly, you should boot off the CD into GParted.  Right-click on dev/sda1 ntfs partition, and choose Resize/Move.

6)  Increase the partition until it takes there is no free space.  Click Resize.

7)  Your partition should now show the increased size.

8)  Nothing has been done yet.  All you have done is enter the new proposed configuration.  Click Apply.

9)  Click Close once complete.

10)  You should now see the update partition configuration.

11)  Be sure to remove your Gparted or other CD/DVD before you reboot your system.

12)  That's it!