How to Increase VMware Virtual Machine Disk Size and Expand Partition?

Virtual machine is an important part of VMware virtual infrastructure. All the commands and operations need virtual machines to execute.

When a VMware virtual machine is freshly created, there might be just a light task for it so it just requires a few hardware resources including processor and disk. After some time, more tasks are assigned to it so it requires more hardware resources.

Storage is necessary for a VMware virtual machine. You can not only change the initial storage when you create the virtual machine, but also add storage into it to increase disk size when it needs more storage in the later work.

Whether you're using VMware Workstation (software virtualization), or VMware ESXi (server virtualization), the storage expansion goal can be achieved. 

Generally speaking, there are just two steps to resize VMware VM disk. The first step is adding storage to the target virtual machine and the second step is making the additional storage available for virtual machine. 

How to increase disk size in VMware Workstation?

We know that you want to get more storage on your virtual machine, but preparation is also the very important step. Because resizing the virtual disk is likely to cause data loss, so you should do the preparation:

1. Make sure you have a backup of the virtual machine.

2. Make sure all snapshots have been removed.

3. Make sure the virtual machine is shut down.

Method 1. Increase virtual disk with command line

Type vmware-vdiskmanager -x 100Gb vm.vmdk and press Enter to rezise the disk.

100Gb here is the final size of virtual disk. You could replace it as you wish as long as it is larger than the former size.

vm.vmdk here is the path of the virtual disk.

Note: You need to open the Windows or Linux Command Prompt on host OS because the guest machine has been powered off.

Method 2. Increase virtual disk with VMware Workstation client

In VMware Workstation, select the target virtual machine > select Edit Virtual Machine Settings > click Hrad Disk > click Utilities > select Expand > enter the target virtual disk size > click Expand.

How to increase disk size on VMware ESXi?

The way to change disk size using ESXi client is quite easy.

Log in to ESXi > select the virtual machine > click Edit > change the size of Hard Disk > click Save.

Then the hard disk size has been changed.

P.S. VMware virtual disk, the vmdk file, can be used on another hypervisor. For example, you can try converting vmdk to qcow2 to use the virtual disk on KVM virtual machine.

How to expand partition on Windows VM?

After the size of virtual disk is increased, the additional storage is not been used on VM immediately, but is regarded as unallocated storage on virtual machine. You need to manually add it to the partition.

Open the guest machine now > right-click the Windows icon in the lower-left corner > select Disk Management > find the partition next to the unallocated storage > right click the partition > select Extend Volume > click Next in Extend Volume Wizard > select the amount of space you want to add to the partition > click Next > click Finish.

You could see the storage has been added to the partition in Disk Management.

How to backup VMware virtual machine data?

Data security should always be seriously taken because there is always risk of corruption when you modify the configuration of VMware virtual machine. Having a backup could make sure that you could restore the virtual machine any time you need.

To easily make VMware virtual machine backup, you could choose Vinchin Backup & Recovery, which is a professional and mature solution that supports complete protection of ESXi servers.

Agentless Backup: Spending time deploying agents is not needed now. Just add the host to Vinchin Backup & Recovery and then you could backup all the VMs on the host.

Instant Recovery: If your VM is corrupted during configuration changing, it could be recovered with the backup in 15 seconds to guarantee the continuity of business.

Deduplication & Compression: To save the backup storage, Vinchin Backup & Recovery would identify and exclude the duplicated data, while compressing the rest of the backup data to save more than 60% storage.

HotAdd Data Transfer: With Vinchin Backup & Recovery, VMware VMs can be efficiently backed up via HotAdd, without traditional LAN-based transfer needed that consumes much production network resource.

Cross-Platform Recovery (V2V): Your virtual machine could not only be recovered on the original virtual platform, but also on a new virtual platform. If you're also planning to migrate data from other virtualizations to VMware, Vinchin Backup & Recovery is able to help by simply recovering VM backups of the original one to VMware.

Virtual platform backup could be easy and effective with Vinchin Backup & Recovery. Just start a free 60-day full-featured trial to experience all its features including CBT (Changed Block Track) for VMware, BitDetector, File-level Recovery, Archive Backups to Cloud, etc. Just click the button to get the intallation package.

Conclusion

The need for VM storage is gradually increased so you need to increase disk size of VMware virtual machine. In this passage, you have known how to add storage to virtual machine on VMware Workstation and VMware vSphere ESXi and how to make the added storage effective for partition.

Changing the configuration of virtual machine is likely to cause VM corruption so you could use Vinchin Backup & Recovery to easily make VM backup and protect your data.