Posts tagged basic

VMWare ESX: Extend Windows Server 2008 Basic volume hard disk

Sep 30th

Last week I run into free disk space problem on my Windows Server 2003 virtual machine and today on another virtual machine running Windows Server 2008 I encountered same thing again. The virtual disk was sized for 10GB and only 80MB was free.

The virtual machine is running Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft enhanced the feature for extending basic disk volumes on the fly. In my previous post I needed to add the virtual disk to another server; assign a drive letter and than run the extend option in diskpart. Within VI client extend the "Hard Disk" in the properties of the virtual machine to desired and planned size and goto Computer Management / Storage / Disk Management, right-click and Refresh.

The additional defined disk space will be shown as "Unallocated". Right-click on the C:\ volume and choose "Extend Volume". Follow the wizard and within seconds the basic volume has been extended. Thanks to VMWare ESX and Microsoft Server 2008 our lives as System Engineers is becoming easier.

As lesson learned size your virtual environment appropriate and especially the Hard Disk configuration.

VMWare ESX: Virtual Hard Disk FULL

Sep 28th

Posted by Ivan Versluis in ESX

1 comment

I am working to prepare my virtual machine to move it from test network to production. Before bringing this virtual machine to production I wanted to run the latest updates and during the process my virtual hard disk went full ;-(. I sized the vm with 6GB of disk space and yes I run into disk space problem.

VMWare ESX allows you to extend the virtual disk size on a running virtual machine. How to extend the virtual disk size? Right click the virtual machine in the VI cleint; choose settings and go to “Hard Disk 1″ and type new disk size. Click OK.

Example of my new Disk Configuration in “Disk Management”. To extend the virtual disk we need to go to diskpart and extent the volume.

I opened command prompt and opened diskpart; selected the volume and run extend.

The volume you selected may not be extended.
Please select another volume and try again.

My virtual hard disk was full and I was not able to extend my basic disk with the additional 2GB I added to this configuration.

Thanks to Kalpesh Prajapati post I was able to find a solution to my problem.

Follow these steps to extend your virtual machine basic hard disk:

Shutdown the virtual machine
Extend the virtual disk size
Add the harddisk to another virtual machine and start it up (second virtual machine)
Open command prompt and start diskpart.exe
list volumes and select the volume with the disk problem
extend the disk

Make sure the volume has a drive letter assigned otherwise same warning will be returned. Virtual machine was started again without any problems and two additional gigs of disk space.

Links:

Arne Fokkema posted another way how to perfom these actions on a basic disk. It should be easier if you download the additional ExtPart.exe tool from Dell. Extend the OS disk the easy way (ExtPart.exe)