Thursday, January 3, 2013

Expanding VMware ESXi Guest Virtual Disk Drives

We had few ESXi hosted guest servers that were running out of disk space at an alarming rate.  Here is the simplest way to  expand the drive capacity , Including C (System) drive.

Applies to:
VMware ESXi , 5.0 , 5.1
Windows Server 2008 , 2008 R2

Steps:
1. Shut down the Guest operating system.
2. In vSphere client , go to virtual machine properties and increase the size of the disks. Provide new values in the Provisioned Size: field. (Image 1)
3. Save changes and power on the Guest virtual machine.
4. Go to disk management in the host machine. You will see newly added space as "Unallocated"
5. Right-click on the partition and select "Expand Volume" (Image 2)

Image 1 - Virtual Machine Disk Properties

Image 2 -Disk Management , Expand Volume