VMware to the Rescue Again

Well a colleague of mine had an issue today. A physical server running VMware server with 2 vm’s on it. One VM’s disk “exploded” and we were left with 0% (yep that is right) free space on the HD of the physical server.

Now if this was a small VM then that would not be a problem but the vmdk was 120 GB in size (even though inside the VM it was only using 40GB). So to remove the file from the server would have taken too long.

Solving the problem was one of two options:

Run VMware converter and therefore resize the disk. Hook up to the the Physical server via a share from a machine running VMware workstation. We chose the latter (which was a bit more difficult to accomplish because the physical server was running Linux). Installed Samba and configured a share on the physical server. Opened the VM from a workstation. Added an additional HD (vmdk) with 50gb of space, and ghosted Disk 0 to Disk 1.

Process took something like 30 minutes. Booted the machine off the new vmdk. Ran through the tests and deleted the old 120GB vmdk.

You gotta love VMware products!!!