How to increase Disk/Drive space of a running Virtual Machine, in VMware?

Or, How to increase Drive space of a Virtual Machine in VMware without Reboot/Restart?

Or, How to extend/increase Disk size in windows computers?

Scenario: This is common situation for every system administrator. Here in my case, Drive E:\ of one of the server is running with low disk space and I want to increase the Disk space of affected drive but don’t want to reboot my server anyways.

Below is the screenshot of the situation (E:\ drive running with low disk space).

Steps (Resolution):

1. Login to vSphere Client > Right Click on the VM you want > Go to Edit Settings

2. Select the Virtual Disk which is running with Low Disk Space > Increase the Provisioned Size value to maximum capacity you want to add in the exiting Disk space

Now Login to the machine and extend the drive space by using Disk Management Console:

3. Go to RUN > type diskmgmt.msc > Hit Enter

4. If not able to see the unallocated space in front of the drive you have increased capacity for, Click in Refresh button as shown in below screenshot.

5. After Clicking on Refresh button, you will be able to see the unallocated space like shown in below screenshot.

6. Right Click on the used capacity area of the disk > Click on Extend Volume

7. Click Next

8. Select the total Disk Space > Click Next

9. Click Finish

Result Verification:

10. Explore Computer > You will be able to see the increased disk space has been added in the drive.

Cheers, please write me back if you have any query of feedback on this.

How to decrease drive capacity of a Windows OS based Virtual Machine in VMware?

Or, Can we decrease drive capacity of Virtual Machine having windows operating system in VMware?

If you are looking for a simple way of decreasing the drive space of a virtual machine as you do for increasing drive space, it’s not there in VMware. So, the answer is NO, we can’t decrease the drive space of a Virtual Machine in VMware but there is a way out of doing it and that is V2V migration of the Virtual Machine.

Possibility: For decreasing the drive capacity of a virtual machine you may perform V2V migration of the virtual machine by using VMware vSphere Standalone Converter (use o latest one). If you don’t want your exiting production to be impacted, you may choose to perform V2V migration of the virtual machine in powered on state.

When you reached to the “Options” page of the converter tool, you are required to follow below steps to decrease the drive capacity of a Virtual Machine (Please refer below screenshots with highlighted steps to be taken):

To Know about How to do V2V or P2V conversion of a virtual machine, please see another article:

How to do V2V or P2V migration in VMware?

IMP Points To Note:

1. Once the Migration is completed, you can check your destination VM’s drive capacity it should be appearing as you have defined the value (in GB) as per last screenshot.

2. In some cases, you may need to re-join your newly migrated VM in domain to make it fully functional.  It better you delete the old computer account and then re-join this machine in domain to create a new computer account for this new VM instance.

3. You may need to re-activate the license of the Windows machine after this activity.

Cheers, You may write me back for any suggestion or feedback..