Resize and Expand Disk Partitions in Vmware / Vsphere ESX

We all have come accross the problem that we run out of space on the main/boot partition of a virtual machine.

Well if you work with Vmware ESX or ESX(i) then you are very lucky. You can very easy resize the hard disk.

Switch off the VM go to Edit Settings and just add more space to the disk. Case solved? No yet!

You now have a bigger disk but the partion is still the same.

If it is a logical disk or any data disk then what you need is diskpart but if your disk is the boot disk the diskpart does not work.

What you need is a third party software to expand the partition and what better than an opensource solution.

Gparted is the name of the tool I used. You can download the live CD iso and boot from there..in minutes you can resize the partition!

It worked perfect on an Microsoft Windows 2003 R2 server who run out of space on C:

I have not tried it yet on a physical server but the procedure is the same, it will just take some more time.

Ofcourse there are a lot of other utilities for resizing and expanding a partition out there.