One of the advantages of VMware is that we can expand the hard disks of virtual machines easily and whenever we have space available. To do this, it can be done in two ways, either by command or by GUI.

By command, it would be from the ESX shell and with the virtual machine in question stopped. We must go to the directory where the virtual machine is saved, Default /VMFS/Volumes/STORAGE/MAQUINA_VIRTUAL. Once inside we will run the VMKFSTOOLS -X command TAMAÑO_EN_GBG FICHERO_VMDK. And so we will easily expand its size.

Another option is from the console “VMware Virtual Center” Connected to the customer, right-click on top of the virtual machine in question and “Edit Setings…”, on the “Hardware” select our hard drive and we would have the option to “New Size”, we indicate in gigabytes the size we want and “OK”.

Now what is needed is to tell the virtual machine, to your operating system that has been resized, in the case of a Windows (be XP, 2003, View or 2008) we can do it, Restarting the virtual machine in safe mode, by pressing F8. Once we are inside the VC, we must run a command from MSDOS: diskpart.

Within that command we must know which volume has changed, Inside 'Diskpart’ We'll run 'List Volume’ to see what volumes we have in our S.O., it will show us the logical disks/volumes, we select the one we have enlarged, in my case it will be the volume 2, which used to occupy 6Gb and now 8Gb, So we select it with the command 'Select Volume 2’ and extend it with the command: 'extend'. Once executed, we will be able to start the VM in the usual way.

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