Extending a virtual disk only extends a virtual machine's disk. This does not automatically increase the size of the file system (such as NTFS for Windows and ext3 for Linux) within the guest. For more information on how to extend the virtual disk, see the documentation for your VMware product.

This article describes increasing the size of a disk partition. The virtual disk may have unallocated space that you now want to use. You may also have increased the size of a virtual machine's virtual disk but are unable to see the new space from the virtual machine's operating system.

• You need to increase the size of a virtual disk partition.
• You have increased the size of a virtual disk but can see no increase in available space in virtual machine.
• The partition does not increase with the increase in disk size.
• You cannot see new disk space.
• Expanding a virtual disk does not work.

You can expand the size of the VMDK disk while the virtual machine is online. However, you must reboot the guest operating system (OS) in the virtual machine so that it is aware of the size change of the VMDK disk.

Also, ensure that the virtual machine is not running on snapshots, as this prevents the VMDK from being extended.

Depending on the guest OS in the virtual machine, there are several methods available to increase the file system within the virtual machine.
 

Extending a Windows guest file system

If you have another Windows virtual machine with the same version of the operating system, you could temporarily attach the operating system VMDK to this virtual machine (known as a helper VM) and extend the file system on the VMDK from this virtual machine using the Windows DiskPart tool.

If the VMDK disk you need to extend does not contain the operating system disk then you can use DiskPart in the original virtual machine without the need for a helper VM.

For more information on extending a VMDK disk using DiskPart, see Extending partitions in Windows using DiskPart (1007266).

Extending a Linux guest file system

If you are running a file system other then ext3, you may need to research an alternative way of accomplishing this. Reiser has its own tool for accomplishing this, GParted Live CD is another popular tool for this.

Examples of third-party utilities

Notes:

• VMware does not endorse or recommend any particular third party utility, nor is the above list meant to be exhaustive.
• The preceding links were valid as of June 19, 2009. If you find the links to be broken, provide feedback on the article and a VMware employee will update the article as necessary.

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VMware command line utilities used to resize virtual disks do not touch the data or partitions inside the virtual disks. Any desired partition changes must be made from the virtual machine's operating system.

For more information, see Adding space to an ESX host virtual disk (994).