Increasing virtual disk in ESX 3.5

My installation of BackTrack has only a 10 GB virtual disk, because I was using the default settings when I installed it. Now I want to increase it to 25 GB.

This can be done through opening the VMware Infrastructure-Client (only available for Windows). After it has started, you have to right-click on the virtual machine that needs a bigger virtual disk and choose "Edit Settings" in the context menu. Then you have to select "Virtual Disk" Now you can increase the size of the disk and confirm the new size with "Ok".

All the steps I just described can also be done, when the VM is still running. As a next step we need to increase the partition, so that the VM will recognize the new space and that the disk size has changed. For this task we will use GParted. We just need to download the GParted ISO and upload it to the ESX server so that we can select it in the VM settings as "Datastore ISO File". With this settings the VM will boot up GParted when the VM is starting:

If GParted won't boot (in my case I had this problem), you have to force the VM to go into the BIOS settings and change the boot order (CD-Rom should be first, at least before HD ;-)

After a new try to boot GParted, we can see now that GParted is actually booting :-)

After selecting the key-map I couldn't just start X. I had to configure it through the wizard first, otherwise I was getting this error (see also screenshot):

Virtual width (1184) is too large for the hardware (max 1180)
Screen(s) found, but none have a usable configuration.

You have to select "Run Forcevideo to config X manually" and click through the wizard. You should take a resolution of 800x600.

Now GParted should have started and you just have to make a right-click on the unused space and create a new partition with an ext4 filesystem.

After the changes have been applied, there is a new partition with 15 GB.

After a reboot we just need to modify /etc/fstab. With fdisk -l we can see all harddisks and partitions:

/dev/sda3 is my new partition with almost 15GB and will now be added to /etc/fstab as new partition for /root. We just need to find out the UUID to insert it into fstab:

That's it :-)


URL
VMware Increasing virtual disk size