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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.

Related links:

• Technet - Extend a Basic Volume

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)

Who could ever believe and see VMWare releasing their ESX for free. Last night I read small post on my Windows Mobile device.

What is VMware ESXi 3.5?
VMware ESXi 3.5 is the industry’s first, thin hypervisor integrated into server hardware. With its next-generation architecture embedded in hardware, VMware ESXi enables a plug-and-play data center with greater security, reliability and manageability. Requiring no installation and minimal configuration, VMware ESXi accelerates server deployment—IT organizations can take servers from boot-up to running production applications in virtual
machines in minutes.

List of features is amazing and now we all get them for free. Check the full list here, but these are which I like:

• Bare-metal architecture
• Small Footprint with only 32MB
• Virtualization for storage and support for iSCSI
• VLAN tagging support
• Wake-on LAN
• 64bit support

Basically all features I missed with VMWare Server and now getting them for free with ESX3i version.

Why is VMware making ESXi free? VMware is making its standalone ESXi hypervisor available at no cost in order to help companies of all sizes experience the benefits of virtualization. Customers have shown tremendous interest in ESXi due to its innovative architecture, simple setup, and high performance. Allowing IT administrators to obtain VMware ESXi for free enables everyone to gain access to VMware’s datacenter technology and prove its value in their own companies.

I have nothing more to add than just go download the VMware ESXi data sheet for more information and get a free copy of VMware ESXi and try it for yourself. I am running couple of production host servers with VMWare Server  and will upgrade them very soon.