I am working on a “top secret” upcoming product (around Cloud of course) and because of that I am testing various things. I had never noticed this before but today I wanted to change the size of a disk within vCenter as part of the test procedure. For some weird reason this option was greyed out:
I checked if there was a snapshot on the disk but that wasn’t the case. I tried the same thing on a different VM and it actually wasn’t greyed out. Then I noticed the difference between the VMs… The VM on which it was greyed out had an “IDE” disk and the other VM had a “SCSI” disk. It appears that it is currently not possible to change the size of an IDE virtual harddisk within vCenter.
Ran into this a few times…pain in the butt. Fix: If you use the vcenter converter plugin, you can resize the vmdk that way. It will import it as a thick disk, but a quick svmotion will take care of that if it is a concern.
Jon
Yeah I know…. Converter usually offers a workaround to issues like these.
I’m wondering why it cares. It sounds like a UI issue rather than an environmental limitation — out of curiosity, were your VMs powered on or powered off? If you were going to use Converter, vmkfstools would work as well and eliminate the need to clone the disk.
Now you’ve given me something to dig into.
…or just deploy the XP VM’s using the custom option instead of typical. This way you can choose SCSI LSI, then using the F6 method add in the driver. Then, with a SCSI controller, you can increase easily without the use of converter.
I ran through a few of my own tests and was definitely able to resize the backend disk using vmkfstools -X, and the VM saw the new space.
However, getting vCenter to recognize the change is another story — the IDE disk still shows up in the VM’s configuration as the original size, and the storage reporting information inside vCenter is also wrong. I unregistered and re-registered the VM and that made the new size show up.
I also tried to extend another IDE disk using PowerCLI and get an “Invalid operation for device ’0′” error when I submit the change, so there definitely appears to be something blocking the change at the API level.
I’m curious to know why the limitation, not that I use IDE hard disks in many of my VMs.
Hi Duncan,
I read this article a few days ago and it prompted me to finish an article I had been working on myself. I had exactly the same issue and decided to find a way to convert the IDE disk to SCSI without using VMware Converter OR redeploy the VM from scratch. I have posted it here:
http://www.jjclements.co.uk/2010/06/08/vsphere-convert-vm-ide-disk-to-scsi-disk