Comments on: VMware ESX vSphere resize disk

By: santiago

santiago — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 22:14:08 +0000

I just made an extension on volume c:. It runs fine. Thank you

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 21:50:55 +0000

I tried this, was not sure it worked as other websites had much more complex ways to do this but this worked amazingly and was so simple!

By: Nacho Libre

Nacho Libre — Mon, 24 May 2010 23:46:44 +0000

Just tried this, worked perfect. Thanks!

By: James Clements

James Clements — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 15:04:10 +0000

Hi KK, the easiest way to shrink a VMDK is probably to use VMware converter. This can be done in a few simple steps:

1) Install VMware Converter on the VM that you want to shrink the VMDK(s) of.
2) Run VMware Converter and select the options to 'import a machine' and then 'this local machine'.
3) Select the volumes you want to import and change 'maintain size' to 'type size' and specify your reduced VMDK size(s).
4) Complete the wizard to import the virtual machine
5) Shutdown the original VM and power on the newly imported VM (with the smaller VMDK(s)

By: KK

KK — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 14:00:23 +0000

What about to shrink the size of the virtual disk? When i iedit the settings to make it smaller it goes back to the original size. We are importing physical machines to the virtual environment and some disk are way too big....

By: addison

addison — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:36:21 +0000

Thank you. This worked well.

By: Giankdir

Giankdir — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:30:54 +0000

Hi Dom, this is probably because
1- you cannot resize virtual disk if there are any snapshot of that VM;
2- you cannot resize IDE disk (IDE disk are used to install windows XP to avoid the SCSI driver installation).
Look at this post on VMware community
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/238733

By: Dom

Dom — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 11:34:57 +0000

Hi - on my VM's (v.7 ESX4.0), in the disk provisioning section on the dard disk properties it's all greyed out - can't change the size?
why's that?

By: Gelson

Gelson — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:00:10 +0000

It worked! No shutdown required. But beware: when you just run"extpart", the program asks the drive letter. It is essential that you type the letter followed by ":", otherwise the error "Unable to connect to C or it does not exist" occurs.

By: James Clements

James Clements — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:42:41 +0000

I guess there *should be* but even the command line utility included with windows (diskpart) doesn't resize the OS volume on the fly. Similarly, most 3rd party partition applications that can be installed onto the operating system will not resize a volume containing the paging file. This is not the case if you boot the VM from a 3rd party app on an .iso or cd/dvd.

If there is no Microsoft utility available to do this effortlessly (i.e. not requiring a separate .iso or cd/dvd and a reboot of the VM) then VMware probably won’t ever (need or want to) modify the UI on the vSphere client.