Resizing a VMWare Hard Disk, The Easy Way
I recently had to resize a VHD, and once again was lost in the many blog posts and vague documentation on the process. It seems that resizing disks is one of those things that sometimes works right out of the chute, and other times takes a dozen attempts using different processes. That said, I’m going to add to the slew of blog posts with this one- the process I used which worked first try on several different environments.
VMWare has a slick little standalone application called vCenter Converter that can help us do this. The converter’s primary job is to help you virtualize your environment by converting physical hardware into virtual images; we’re going to think a little bit outside the box here. One of the nice things about vCenter Converter is that it’s free. You’ve got no licensing to worry about, so if you’re using a lightweight app like the VMWare Player to just run your images and don’t have the full blown utility of Workstation or Server behind your tasks, this solution will still work for you. In addition, if you’re out in the field or at a client site with limited access to the host boxes, you can also use this method to resize a VHD isolated from the actual environment.
We’re essentially going to convert our existing VM to itself, and change the configuration along the way. As we’re going to be reading, writing and modifying the active VM along the way, you should power down the VM in question (if you haven’t already). Be smart also, take a backup just in case; they’re wonderful things to have. At the top of the vCenter Converter UI there’s two buttons, “Convert Machine” and “Configure Machine”. On a side note, depending on your environment you may be able to just hit “Configure Machine”, select the VM and make your changes, but I ran into a lot of inconsistencies here. Sometimes it worked flawlessly, sometimes it errored out, and sometimes it just failed to even correctly load the source VM. Due to that inconsistency I’m going to take you through the convert process which will see us making a new (modified) version of the existing VM, which we’ll replace the old one with at the end. To begin we’re going to hit “Convert Machine”.