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.