How to increase VM hard disk

Publish : 2022 Jul 18 837 view Cat : AVANETCO + VMware
increase VM hard disk
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Vmware is one of the most used and popular enterprise virtualizations that Avanetco uses as well. so a basic question would for junior admins would be how to increase VM hard disk or troubleshoots its errors.

before you can increase VM hard disk there are some things you should check . when you first create a VM , you are asked the type of hard disk and based on that type the process differs, now we have two types of disks:

increase VM hard disk

  1. Thin provision: if you have checked this type then you can easily increase VM hard disk with virtual machine powered on.
  2. Thick provision : if you have chosen this type then you wouldn’t be able to increase vm size by the method above yo need to migrate the VM first so that you are asked to choose the hard type again and then choose thin provision this time and then you can do the steps to increase vm hard disk

As migration is such a complicated task we will cover in another article and now will see the scenario where you have a thin provisioned hard disk which is expandable.

note that you should first remove all snapshots.

Log into Vcenter or ESXI server of that VM and right click on that VM and select edit settings and choose the hard disk you want to increase:

increase VM hard disk

expand that disk menu and enter the new capacity .

increase VM hard disk

now since the VM was on OS might not detect the changes, in Windows you can follow the steps below but for linux we need reconfigurations so we’ll cover in another post:

in windows open disk management and click rescan disks

windows extend partition