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How to increase disk provisioning in ESXi 5

Hi Guys,

I increased the storage on a VMWare ESXi 5.x server by adding another disk to the server.

I managed to expand the storage of the Datastore.

I am now trying to increase the disk provisioning space for the virtual machine, but I seem to be having some challenges.
I powered off the virtual machine, but the Disk Provisioning section stays grayed out.

Kenza Cohen

You could use command line:

vmkfstools -X 6G -d eagerzeroedthick vm.vmdk

vm.vmdk would be the disk image and the 6GB you can change to the size you would like it to be

As with any operation on a disk make sure you back it up first.

cp olddisk.vmdk olddisk_backup.vmdk

Once this is done you would need to go ahead and deal with the partition table in the Guest OS

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

If the items are grayed out, it's because the disk in it's current state does not support expansion.

Is the disk IDE ?

does the disk have a snapshot ?

please see my EE Article

HOW TO: Resize a VMware (VMDK) Virtual Disk

Rupert Eghardt

ASKER

Hi Andrew,

The physical hardware is IBM SAS drives

Rupert Eghardt

ASKER

I've noticed under snapshot manager, there is a snapshot listed from last year.
Should I delete this snapshot, will this enable the disk provisioning options?

Kenza Cohen

If you are confident that you no longer need the snapshot then this should be fine :)

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

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