Expand Virtual disk (VMDK) in VMware


How to Grow a virtual disk in a VMWare virtual machine

A VMDK file can be grown while no virtual machine is using it. Growing the VMDK only makes the virtual harddrive bigger - filesystem within the VMDK must still to be grown with other methods. 

On ESX Server:
          vmkfstools -X <newsize>Gb  filename.vmdk
On ESX 3.5, you can also edit the VM settings and edit the harddrive when the VM is not running.

Note:  On ESX the filename.vmdk file is just a  file containing metainformation and "filename-flat.vmdk" is the actual data file. 

However, vmkfstools operations are used on the metafile




On VMware Server Workstation and VMware Fusion:
           vmware-vdiskmanager -x <newsize>Gb filename.vmdk


For Example:


    If growing an existing vmdk file named "server1.vmdk" and it is to be grown so it's new size is 20GB, the command would be:

On ESX Server:


          vmkfstools -X 20GB server1.vmdk



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1 comments:

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May 10, 2018 at 6:22 PM delete

Awesome this helped on the root partition of my vcenter server. now i can upgrade my vcenter server.

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