enlarge a virtual disk in vmware for mac os

ENLARGE A VIRTUAL DISK IN VMWARE FOR MAC OS PRO

There may be more than one file if the VMDK is set to split into extents.

Copy the VMDK file(s) to your working folder.

You might need to right click and do ‘Show Package Contents’ if using Fusion.

Create a new working folder to manipulate the VMDK in.

Virtual Machine -> Settings -> General -> Clean Up Virtual Machine.

Delete the temporary partition we created in the previous section.

You might as well do the same on the system partition too.

This writes zeros into the empty space.

Open a Command Window, navigate to the extracted files and run.

Create a new (temporary) simple partition that fills up the empty space that we intend to remove from the VMDK and assign it a drive letter.

Now that we have a disk setup that looks like the below, we can crack on with altering the VMDK itself. This makes it easier to manage the empty VMDK extents later, and you can always expand the volume back out to the end of the drive at the end of the process.

Disk Management -> Right Click Volume -> Shrink Volume -> Enter the size to shrink the volume by -> Shrinkįeel free to go as small as it allows, but shoot for a final volume size that is at least 4-5 GB smaller than the size you want to adjust the VMDK to.

I advocate running a defrag of the volume at the OS level before you start. So first of all, we need to shrink the partition on the disk so that we dont lob off the end of it when we shrink the VMDK. Its not a supported or documented method, so your mileage may vary, backup your VM before trying etc!! Preparing the VM

ENLARGE A VIRTUAL DISK IN VMWARE FOR MAC OS PRO

So I kept poking around and managed to get it done – so I thought I’d share a Pro Tip that might help others get to the solution a little faster. I read that the only supported method was to use VMware vCenter Converter (which I tried) but it was real slow as it does a file based copy, and didn’t actually work for me in the end. I dug around with Dr Google for a while, and struggled to find the answer.

Enlarge a virtual disk in vmware for mac os