VmWare Primary HDD Expansion

Question

I have a VmWare virtual machine that is coming dangerously close to it's primarry HDD's limit and I need to extend it. How do I do this? I'm working with VmWare Workstation 6.0.5

Answer 1

This link gives two approaches that should help.

It looks like this is the most straightforward method:

vmware-vdiskmanager -x 12GB path\to\disk.vmdk

where 12GB is the desired size of the expanded volume.

Answer 2

I don't know about 6.0.5, but in former versions there used to be a program called vmware-vdiskmanager in VMWare's program directory. You can use this one to extend the virtual disk container.

After you expanded the container, you need to expand the partitions in the guest, you have to do this from "the inside", which depends on the OS you are using on the guest and the filesystem. I often use an Ubuntu Life-CD or a System-Rescue-CD ISO together with qtparted to expand the partitions as needed.n

Answer 3

Assuming this is under Windows, there is a program usually in "C:\Program Files\VMWare\VMware Workstation\" called vmware-vdiskmanager.exe that you can use to do this. Open a DOS prompt and CD to that directory. The command to expand the drive is:

vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -x 50Gb NameOfDisk.vmdk

Also, this isn't the only thing you can do with this command. If you just type the command w/o any parameters you will see a bunch of the other available options.

Answer 4

I've sometimes had problems when using the vmware-vdiskmanager application (it created the extra space, but I couldn't use it). At which point, I used the GParted live CD, which worked perfectly.