Resizing Disks Inside Guests

i’ve found it’s easier to catch the vmware bios screen if you connect directly to the ESX server with the client rather than using the virtualcenter. It seems when the VC does it’s various HA and DRS checks against the system(s) it pauses and doesn’t show the first step in the console.

Is there any benefit to doing this over using VMWare Converter? I have use it on a few servers now and it has worked pretty well. It basically copies the original VM, then expands the drive(s). It also has to be powered down. After you verify it is working, you can delete the original VM. But if something did go wrong, you can boot back up your original VM right were you left it. It has been great for us.

Before we went 100% fiber channel we were using ISCSI with Snap Drive from netapp to resize disks on the fly. It was a lot easier and faster and didn’t require the server to be shutdown!

Were hoping that with Fiber Channel Virtualization in 3.0.2 with Emulex HBA’s we might finally be able to use snap drive again!

Information is very helpful, and it is going to help lots of guys like me, Other thing I realised why not use diskpart.exe. Diskpart is also tricky thing I know, it works something and sometime it fails.

I’ve found that using diskpart under Windows PE 2 is very effective. Windows PE is now free as part of the Windows Vista AIK (Automated Install Kit)
Download the AIK @ http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=c7d4bc6d-15f3-4284-9123-679830d629f2&displaylang=en
Build a PE 2 ISO, some excellent instructions are available @
http://www.minasi.com/newsletters/nws0701.htm
Boot from the PE 2 ISO, at the command prompt type “diskpart”
To see your physical disks, type “list disk”
To see your partitions, type “list vol”
To extent a partition first select it “select vol n”, then extend it “extend”
Type “exit” twice to exit first diskpart then PE and the system will reboot.

It’s also possible to automate the diskpart action if you wish by creating a text file of the actions you want and calling it from a batch file or script.
diskpart.txt
select vol 0
extend
exit

Then call it via:
diskpart /s diskpart.txt

I’m somewhat more confidant of diskpart working properly for resizing an NTFS volume, because AFAIK MS have never released the specifications to the NTFS data structures and the Linux driver has been reverse engineered. Now I’ll freely admit that the guys who wrote the NTFS driver for Linux did a great job but for critical business work I tend to rely on the code written by the guys who have access to the NTFS source. Just a personal preference…

For ext3 volumes I use the exact method you describe and it works fine.

Slowe-

Using SnapDrive with iSCSI to resize disks on the fly is definitely very cool and very helpful, but that was only for data (non-OS) drives, right? Were you able to use SnapDrive to resize a system (C:) drive?

Yes this is just data drives (as only data drives are ISCSI), but we don’t’ put anything but the on c: so for us we don’t have any disk space problems there. If you wanted to resize the C: drive since its VM format you have to use the process above.

Yes, it does copy the entire VM then expand it. It can take a while so I typically just do it during a maintenance window if needed on a production server. It is just nice being able to “roll back” to the original VM if needed. It is a good safety net.

We don’t have our VM environment on NetApp yet although our Exchange databases are getting ready to move to one. All our VMs will be on a CX500 for the time being.

Thanks for the tip. An elegant and quick solution to a problem that was bugging me.
And you’re right - the only slow bits are trying to get the ISO to boot

Dan

I followed the guide but once I got into Windows Disk Manager sees the added space, but Explorer still shows the old partition information.

IE: Explorer still shows my 20GB partition with 11GB used, while Disk Manager shows 40GB.

Any ideas?

This worked like a charm. Saved my skin.

thanks