Resizing an ESXi Virtual Hard Disk
Conveniently ESXi includes a way to increase the size of a virtual hard disk. However, like everything else in ESXi it is neither easy to find nor easy to make work. To save you the effort, here’s how to do it. First, you need to delete any and all snapshots. It won’t work if you have any snapshots. (Don’t worry, deleting them just merges them into the flat disk and deletes the deltas. You won’t lose any information.)
If you have snapshots on the virtual drive you can tell ESXi to make the change. ESXi tells you it resized the disk but it never actually does it. (It doesn’t give an error message, it just doesn’t work). I’d recommend shutting down your VM just in case, though you’re supposed to be able to do it to a live VM the thought is a bit scary for me.
Go to your VM’s Getting Started page in Infrastructure Client and click on “Edit virtual machine settings”. On the left side, there’s an option that says “Hard Disk” and a number. Click that. That brings up this menu:
VMWare ESXi Properties Menu. VHD Settings
On the right, you’ll notice that you can adjust the disk capacity. You can make the drive larger (or smaller) as needed by adjusting the New Size tab. It’s not recommended that you mess with any of the other settings as changing them can confuse your operating system and prevent it from booting. That’s it. You’re done, now you just need to resize the partition so that your OS can make use of the new space.
(While it may seem like I’ve been bashing ESXi, it really is a great product. Once you get it running and figure out its quirks it’s one of the best virtualization solutions around. And it’s free. For what more can you ask?)