This is all done while the operating system is running, too! This is the magic that virtualization provides. For example, you can choose whether you want to use the full size of the unallocated space.Īfter the wizard finishes, your disk is now resized as you requested. This will fire up a pretty simple wizard (not shown). Just by right-clicking on the partition, we have an “Extend Volume” option. So now that we have our “extra space,” resizing the OS drive is another simple task.
In Windows Server 2003, resizing the OS drive wasn't possible, but this changed in Windows Server 2008. This shows one of the awesome improvements in Windows Server. The first thing we're going to do is to get the operating system to do a disk rescan, which is really simple to do via the Disk Management console, by simply selecting Rescan Disks.įrom here, we'll see an extra amount of disk space show up in the console as “Unallocated.” We have the choice of what we want to do with this unallocated space, but in this example, we want to use this space to increase the current size of the operating system drive. We've increased the size of the underlying disk, but need to do a few things in the operating system now. You simply need to change the value in the above VM properties to the desired value and click OK. Let's start off by increasing the size of this disk to 45 GB. Just remember that you won't be able to resize the disk if it has a snapshot. The fact that it's configured as “lazy zeroed” is not important, and what I go through here applies to the other two types of disks you'll find (“thin” and “eager zeroed”). Here's what the settings look like for this VM in VMware. Nothing much to see here except one single volume.
You'll see the Disk Management snapin will show below. Let's start with the simplest example where I have created a Windows Server 2012 VM with a single OS drive of 40 GB.
Along the way, I'm going to discuss a potential issue that can cause a lot of headaches, but ones that can be avoided with pre-defined guidelines or best practices. I'm going to go through the process of increasing the disk space of a virtual machine running Microsoft Windows Server 2012 running on VMware 5.1 (vSphere 5.1, ESXi 5.1 host and VMware tools installed). The whole point of virtualization is having the ability to dynamically change these values, but some can need more than a simple reboot, especially when it comes to resizing disks. One of the most common things that a system administrator will have to do in a virtualized environment is give out more RAM, CPU or disk space to a virtual machine.
Now sometimes, there's some hard lessons to learn if someone jumps in without slowing down to think about certain things, like the guidelines defined up front. The ability to add virtual devices is awesome.
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