increase VM hard drive space 2

[AlphaMagus]

I'm running ESXi 4 on a physical server with an Ubuntu 8.04 LTS virtual machine acting as a file server and a DHCP server. At the moment, I have 50 GB of hard drive space provisioned to the Ubuntu VM and only have 1 GB of free space on it (which potentially could get used up in the coming months) I want to increase it to 75 GB. I have space left on the physical drives (vSphere shows 101 GB free in the datastore)

I have two possible plans to go with:

1) I make a new VM with Ubuntu 10 LTS and migrate all the files from the current file server to this new one. The down side is I have an office of 50 users and I would need to recreate all the permissions and shares.

or

2) I keep the current file server, increase the hard drive space and look at possibly upgrading the VM to Ubuntu 10 LTS down the road. The problem though is if I increase the provisioned hard disk space for the VM, Ubuntu will not see this extra space. I would need to make a new drive in Ubuntu to use the extra provisioned hard drive space and then move some shares over to this new drive to "distribute" the space being used by the shares.

Has anyone had any experience with this kind of problem? They both seem like long processes and because the file server is in use everyday during office hours I only have a small window of time to accomplish this task outside office hours. I do have a second physical server that I can do a run thru on if need be.

What would be my best choice to increase hard disk space for an Ubuntu file server running as a VM? I would appreciate any advice.

 

[cabraun]

I am not a linux person so take this for what it is worth, but couldn't you use a tool like "gparted" to resize your disk?

 

[ArizonaGeek]

I am more of a Redhat user and am not a very big fan of Ubuntu but I would agree with Cabraun, increase the disk size in VMWare then use gparted to increase it for the OS.

Here is a somewhat step-by-step process:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/howto-resize-vmware-virtual-harddisk-size.html

Good luck!

Cheers
Rob

The answer is always "PEBKAC!

 

[AlphaMagus]

Thanks for the direction. I found another site that had some detailed instructions. Method 1 worked well for me. I used the vSphere GUI to provision the hard drive space though.

http://vsphere-land.com/tips-tricks/re-sizing-virtual-disks