How to Increase Disk Space in VMware

Have you ever encountered out of disk space issues on your wonderful VMs when trying install a critical application? Here are a few easy steps that help you to solve the disk space problems on your VMware workstation VMs.

This article assumes that the reader has familiarity with virtualization and has some practical experience with VMware products like workstation.

1. Make sure the following prerequisites are met:

     The virtual machine is powered off.

     The virtual disk is not mapped (on Windows guests) or mounted (on Linux Guests).

              You cannot expand a virtual disk while it is mapped or mounted.

     The virtual machine has no snapshots.

     The virtual machine is not a linked clone or the parent of a linked clone.

      To determine whether the virtual machine has snapshots, is a linked clone, or is the parent of a linked clone, check the information at the top of the Summary tab for the virtual machine.

2.  Select VM > Settings.

3   On the Hardware tab, select Hard Disk for the virtual hard disk to expand.

4   Select Utilities > Expand.

5   Set the new maximum size for the virtual disk.

6   Select Expand.

7   Click OK after the disk expansion process is complete.

8   Download the Gparted iso. Gparted is a free disk management tool. You can use any of the available tools.

9   Mount the Iso on the VM that we have just expanded and power on the VM. Ensure that the VM boots from the Gparted iso.

Gparted provides a friendly UI to do partition and disk operations. The expanded size would appear as unpartitioned space. Resize the existing volume to claim the expanded size. Apply the changes and reboot.

10   On Reboot, the disk would reflect the new size.

How to Install VMware vSphere 5.0 on VMware Workstation 7.1 as a VM

Installing VMware vSphere 5.0 on VMware Workstation 7.0 gives IT professional flexibility to learn or play with new VMware releases. This method will be ideal for test and play around with VMware vSphere 5.
Follow the steps to install ESXi 5 on  VMware workstation 7 on Windows7.
Also I have covered how to upgradeVMware ESXi 4.1 U1 to VMware ESXi 5.0 in below post,
VMware vSphere 5.0 Virtual Machine inside Virtual Machine nested Guests
VMware ESXi 4.1 to VMware ESXi 5.0 Upgrade Process
Download VMware vSphere 5.0
Minimum Requirement for VMware Vsphere 5.0 on a VMware Workstation,
1. Hardware virtualization should be enabled on motherboard bios. or you will get below message during setup 

2. CPU with 2 Core or else you will get error message during setup. Check below screenshot for more details,

3. Minimum 2GB RAM for VMware vSpehere 5 virtual machine. So, you must have minimum 3GB RAM on computer. In my case I using 4GB Ram, as I have 12GB of Ram on my laptop.
Follow below Installation Steps for ESXi5 on VMware Workstation 7
Select New Virtual machine option in File menu and start with custom.

Select Workstation 6.5-7.0 virtual machine hardware compatibility option,

Specify location of your Vmware ESXi 5.0 ISO image,

Select Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 64 bit as a guest Operating for our VMware ESXi 5.0,

Give Virtual Machine name & location,

Here select “Number of Cores per Processor to 2″ otherwise you will get error message during setup. ESXi 5.0 requies 2 cores per processor.

In my case I am using 4GB memory for VMware ESXi 5.0

Use Network type as NAT

Select LSI logic

Click on customize hardware

Remove unwanted hardware such as Floppy drive, USB Controller & Sound Card from your VMware ESXi 5.0 Virtual Machine,

Under Display configuration select “Accelerate 3D Graphics”

Now Virtual machine will start, press enter to continue the setup,

Press Enter to Continue,

Accept VMware License agreement,

Now press enter to install VMware ESXi 5.0 on below storage device as shown in screen shot,

Select your keyboard layout,

Enter Vmware ESXi 5.0 root password, 

Press F11 to install

Now installation has been completed, so press enter to reboot your VMware ESXi 5.0 Virtual Machine,

Now you can see the installed VMware ESXi 5.0  Build 469512

That’s it, now your VMware ESXi 5.0 ready. VMware ESXi 5.0 in evalution mode will work for 60 days, for further use reapply your ESXi 5.0 license to the ESXi 5.0 server.
Now its time to download VMware vSphere Client 5.0, Enter your Vmware ESXi 5.0 Server IP address in Internet Explorer & download VMware vSphere Client 5.0.

VMware vSphere Client 5.0 installation is easy & straight forward. After installation open  VMware vSphere Client 5.o & enter your username & password.

Hope it helps ....,

How to Install VMware vCenter Server 5.0 Step by Step

Install VMware vCenter Server 5.0 using Windows 2008 R2 64bit as base operating system for my VMware vCenter Server. As vCenter Server 5.0 requires a 64-bit operating system and cannot be installed on a 32-bit operating system. Ensure you meet the minimum hardware requirements and that your hardware and operating system requirements are compliant. The vCenter Server 5.0 system can be a physical or a virtual machine.

Hardware Requirements:-
* Processor – Intel or AMD x86 processor with two or more logical cores
* Memory – 4GB RAM. RAM requirements may be higher if your database runs on the same machine as   vCenter Server.
* Disk storage – 4GB Disk requirements may be higher if the vCenter Server database runs on the same machine. In vCenter Server 5.0, the default size for vCenter Server logs is 450MB.Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Express disk requirements Up to 2GB free disk space
Networking – 1Gbit NIC
Operating System Requirement
vCenter Server 5.0 requires a 64-bit operating system and cannot be installed on a 32-bit operating system
These operating systems are supported:
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard, Enterprise or Datacenter SP2 64bit
Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard, Enterprise or Datacenter R2 SP2 64bit
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise or Datacenter SP2 64bit
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise or Datacenter R2 SP2 64bit
My Scenario -
VMware vCenter Server – Windows 2008 R2 64 bit Virtaul Machine with 4GB Ram & CPU with 2 logical cores
SQL Server – SQL Server 2008 R2 64 bit
First, you need to install .NET Framework 3.5.1
To install the .NET Framework 3.5.1 on Windows Server 2008 R2, follow below steps,
1.Open Server Manager.
2.Select the Features tab.
3.On the Feature page, click Add Features.
4.expand the .NET Framework 3.5.1 Features option.
5.Select the .NET Framework 3.5.1 item.  (Without WCF)
6.Click the Next button.
7.On the Confirm Installation Selections page, click the Install button to complete the process.
Setting up the vCenter Server database,
First Install supported version of SQL server on a server or on the vCenter server. Skip this step  if you are planning to use SQL Server Express which comes VMware vCenter.
Create a New SQL Server Database

Name the new database “VCDB” and set the required location for the database files on server & click “OK”

Create a SQL Server user names “VCUSER” & set password as shown below, Untick “Enforce password policy” and change the default database to “VCDB”

Now goto the “User Mapping” section. Tick the “Map” box for “VCDB” databases.
set the default schema to “dbo” and set the role membership to “db_owner”.
Click Ok.

Creating the Data Source (The DSN must be a 64-bit DSN)
Now open Data Source (ODBC) Go to Start -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Data Sources (ODBC)

Click on Add

Select SQL Server Native Client 10.0 & click on Finish.

Assign name to the new data source & select your Sql server.

Enter your SQL server username & password

Test the data source connectivity.

Now we are done with our SQL database connectivity.

Installing VMware vCenter Server 5.0,

First download VMware vCenter Server 5.0  & launch the VMware vCenter Server setup. Select “vCenter Server” to install & Choose your language.

Click Next

Click next to continue,

Read the license agreement and agree. Click Next.

Enter the username, company name and license key (if you havent got a license key it will install a full evaluation version for 60 days)

Enter the system DSN that your created for the vCenter server database.
If using SQL Server 2005 Express select so and continue the installation which will install an instance of SQL Server Express to use as the vCenter Server database.

Click next to continue,

Choose “Create a standard VMware vCenter Server Instance”.

Keep the ports unless your are required to specifically change them form their defaults ones.

Set your deployment inventory size to correctly size the JVM memory for web services. 

Click install

The installation is completed and click Finish. 

Restart the system to apply the changes.

Now check the vCenter server services installed and are started,

Click Start -> Run -> services.msc
Ensure the below services are started and are running
VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices
VMware VirtualCenter Server
VMwareVCMSDS (Note: Runs under Network Service)

VMware vSphere Profile Driven Storage Services.

 

Installing VMware vSphere 5.0 on VMware Workstation
VMware vSphere 5.0 (ESXi 5.0) Virtual Machine inside Virtual Machine nested Guests