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Resize a Virtual Disk with VMware Converter

Posted by vmwarevirtualmachine on December 22, 2008

Resize a Virtual Disk with VMware Converter

Update: Please, also check out my first impressions about VMware Converter 3.0 final.
Some weeks ago, I published an article where I explained how to expand a virtual VMware disk. The whole procedure is quite complicated and time consuming. However, with VMware Converter 3, it is now much easier to enlarge a virtual disk.

The main purpose of VMware Converter is to convert physical machines to virtual machines. Moreover, you can use it to expand virtual disks. I tried this feature today with a VMware Workstation virtual machine and was quite satisfied with the result.

My virtual test server was a Windows Server 2003 SP1 machine with two virtual disks, both with 4 GB of disk space. I selected “standalone virtual machine” as the source and destination system in the VMware Converter wizard. To expand the size of the virtual disks, I chose “Select volumes and resize to save or add space.” This allowed me to change the size of each volume separately. I set the disk space of both volumes to 50 GB.

The whole conversion process took about 75 minutes, which is quite long considering that VMware Converter was running on a relatively new server. The source and destination machines were both on the same physical server.

The new virtual machine booted up without problems. As expected, both volumes were enlarged. However, I had a problem with the VMware tools. They were still installed, but the mouse pointer was quite jerky, which happens if you access a virtual machine remotely without VMware tools installed. I reinstalled them and everything worked fine afterward.

I then tried to convert a running virtual machine, but VMware Converter informed me that I had to shut down this machine first. It seems that VMware Converter doesn’t support hot cloning of virtual machines. Therefore, I am not sure if you can use the Starter Edition to expand virtual disks since only the Enterprise Edition supports cold cloning.

You can at least use the beta for this purpose. So, if your have some virtual machines where you want to resize the disks, I suggest you do this now.

Different Comment:

1. Using VMware Converter…

Craig Pringle walks us through some steps of using VMware Converter, now in beta, wih very nice screen shots. Craig Pringle – Converting a Physical Machine to a Virtual Machine. After that I installed VMWare Converter onto a Windows 2003…

  1. Pingback by VMware Converter 3.0 – Easy Way to Create virtual machines on your computer at TechMixer — February 12, 2007 @ 6:52 am[...] More information on Resize a Virtual Disk with VMware Converter Via LiveHacker Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
  2. Comment by theUtmost — April 19, 2008 @ 7:45 am@Gabriel – which process are you referring to?
    The VM Converter procedure as outlined by Michael?
    Can’t answer that sorry – never tried it.

    As for using the VM Import wizard (as outlined in my comment #24 on the other post):
    “…if you have multiple snapshots, you can keep whatever state you would like for the new VM, although the new VM will not be able to USE any of the snapshots in the old machine. However, you still have the original VM machine unaltered as a backup”
    Hope that helps
    tU

  3. Comment by Paul Coddington — April 29, 2008 @ 1:57 amHmm… seeing an interesting problem with this tool.

    I tried increasing a machine from 25GB to 50GB, and the result is:

    1. VMware reports 50GB.
    2. Guest ‘Windows Disk Manager’ reports 50GB.
    3. Guest ‘Windows Explorer’ reports 25GB.
    4. Guest ‘chkdsk’ reports 25GB.

  4. Comment by Paul Coddington — April 29, 2008 @ 3:43 amOf course, doing it the old-fashioned way works just fine, even better in fact:

    1. Add an extra disk to the VM.
    2. Boot the VM with an Acronis TrueImage CD in the CD-ROM.
    3. Format the new disk using TrueImage.
    4. Backup system to extra disk.
    5. Shutdown VM.
    6. Delete and recreate system disk in larger/smaller size, preallocated or dynamic, as desired.
    7. Disconnect and reconnect all virtual hard disks in required order (to ensure IDE assignments are correct).
    8. Boot from CD.
    9. Format the new blank system disk using TrueImage.
    10. Reboot from CD to reassign drive letters.
    11. Restore image from backup to C: drive.
    12. Shutdown VM.
    13. Delete backup disk.

    Viola: system boots, disk space is increased, no need to repair VMware Tools, gets around VMware 6 not recognising Vista as importable, etc.

  5. Pingback by VMware Converter 3.0 – Easy Way to Create virtual machines on your computer — August 25, 2008 @ 7:37 pm[...] information on Resize a Virtual Disk with VMware Converter Via [...]
  6. Comment by David Faure — August 26, 2008 @ 12:26 pmPaul (comment #12): you need to use ntfsresize to enlarge the filesystem, as explained in http://weblogs.asp.net/kdente/archive/2006/01/07/434789.aspx, I think.

Convert Physical Machines to Virtual Machines – Free!
Use the intuitive wizard-driven interface of VMware Converter to convert your physical machines to virtual machines. VMware Converter quickly converts Microsoft Windows based physical machines and third party image formats to VMware virtual machines. It also converts virtual machines between VMware platforms. Automate and simplify physical to virtual machine conversions as well as conversions between virtual machine formats with VMware Converter.
Convert Microsoft Windows based physical machines and third party image formats to VMware virtual machines
Complete multiple conversions simultaneously with a centralized management

Convert Physical Machines to Virtual Machines in Minutes
VMware Converter can be run on a wide variety of hardware and supports most commonly used versions of the Microsoft Windows operating systems. With this robust, enterprise class migration tool you can:

Quickly and reliably convert local and remote physical machines into virtual machines without any disruption or downtime.

Complete multiple conversions simultaneously with a centralized management console and an intuitive conversion wizard.

Convert other virtual machine formats such as Microsoft Virtual PC and Microsoft Virtual Server or backup images of physical machines such as Symantec Backup Exec LiveState Recovery or Ghost 9 to VMware virtual machines.

Restore VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) images of virtual machines to running virtual machines.

Clone and backup physical machines to virtual machines as part of your disaster recovery plan.

Posted in VMWare Converter | Leave a Comment »

VMWare Converter Beta

Posted by vmwarevirtualmachine on December 22, 2008

VMWare Converter Beta

This beta of VMWare’s Converter seems like a useful idea, create a converter that will allow you to take a current machine setup, and easily turn it into a virtual machine. The possibilities for using this tool boggle my mind a bit, but I’m sure all you Sys Admin folks out there can come up with more than a few ways for this to be useful. Personally, in the area of desktop support and backup, I can see some situations where this could be really useful, as well as one particular area at work. At any larger law firm you have what we call “floater” secretaries, who fill in on secretarial assignments that are not staffed due to illness, vacations or staff shortages. Typically in our office, each of these “floaters” have a desktop machine that is set-up for them to use, and then when they are at the different assignments, they use Remote Desktop Connection to work from that desktop PC rather than having to reconfigure each workstation for them to use. I’m thinking there could be some real hardware savings if we could convert some of those desktops into virtual machines that could be accessed by RDC just the same, and some real time savings in supporting them, with mutliple virtual machines running in one central place, as opposed to hooked into the network all over the place!

Of course, that’s not all this converter does, it also converts from earlier VMWare formats as well as other virtual machine formats, like VirtualPC. Pretty nifty.

Hat tip to Download Squad, who also have a link to LiveCD Player Virtual Machine. If you’ve used either of these tools, let us know what you think!


This entry was posted on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 7:59 pm and is filed under IT, Mike McBride. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Different comment :

Andy 2 years ago

Please login to rate.

I’m REALLY looking forward to getting some time to try this – it will be great to backup pc’s before doing anything risky – the only problem nowadays is the size of the data on most pc’s
VMware recently announced the Public Beta of VMware Converter 4.0. Converter 4.0 will support physical to virtual (p2v) conversion of Linux and W2k8 system. For more information and to sign up for the Beta, see the full announcment on the VMware Converter Community Forum.

Posted in VMWare Converter | Leave a Comment »

VMware vCenter Converter

Posted by vmwarevirtualmachine on December 22, 2008

Automate and simplify physical to virtual machine conversions as well as conversions between virtual machine formats with VMware vCenter Converter. Use the intuitive wizard-driven interface of VMware vCenter Converter to convert your physical machines to virtual machines.

  • Convert Microsoft Windows based physical machines and third party image formats to VMware virtual machines
  • Complete multiple conversions simultaneously with a centralized management console
  • Easy to use wizards to minimize the number of steps to conversion

Convert Physical Machines to Virtual Machines in Minutes

VMware vCenter Converter can be run on a wide variety of hardware and supports most commonly used versions of the Microsoft Windows operating systems. With this robust, enterprise class migration tool you can:

  • Quickly and reliably convert local and remote physical machines into virtual machines without any disruption or downtime.
  • Complete multiple conversions simultaneously with a centralized management console and an intuitive conversion wizard.
  • Convert other virtual machine formats such as Microsoft Virtual PC and Microsoft Virtual Server or backup images of physical machines such as Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery or Norton Ghost 12 to VMware virtual machines.
  • Restore VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) images of virtual machines to running virtual machines.
  • Clone and backup physical machines to virtual machines as part of your disaster recovery plan.

Choose From Two Available Editions of VMware vCenter Converter

  • VMware vCenter Converter Starter is an easy to use product for single conversions available to everyone as a free download.
  • VMware vCenter Converter Enterprise is a robust, enterprise-class product for managing and automating large scale conversions.

NOTE: VMware P2V Assistant is no longer available for purchase. VMware vCenter Converter is our next generation product now available to automate the process of converting physical machines, third party image formats and other virtual machines to VMware virtual machines.

Posted in VMWare Converter | Leave a Comment »

 
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