Extending the VIRL VM disk

@ndo wrote:

Hi all

I've been hitting the space limit on my VIRL VM for quite a while now and finally decided to do something about it. I thought I'd write down the steps I took so that it could benefit someone else in this community.

What I offer here is a guide. If you're not comfortable, please don't attempt it. More importantly, make sure that you have a backup. I chose to clone my VIRL VM, extend the disk and then test things out. Once everything worked fine, I deleted the old VM. Chances are, if you really need the disk space, you probably know this already.

I am using VMware Fusion Pro 7 and so some steps may vary.

Firstly, let's start by cloning the VM. Select Create Full Clone.

Time to grab a coffee, tea or whatever.

Pasted image633x514 84.8 KB

If it's been 20 minutes and you're still here, you should have probably gone and got a couple beers. There's still time

Now, you're going to want to download something like GParted (gparted.org) while waiting for the clone to complete. Downloading the live ISO will do just fine: http://gparted.org/livecd.php. I have done this in various other ways, though, this is the safest method and also the easiest to follow.

Once the clone is complete, download of GParted is complete, you're all set to go. You now need to edit the VM properties (or be really quick when you power on the machine) and mount the GParted ISO and connect it. In Fusion, it looks like this:

Before we power the machine on, we need to expand the disk within VMware. Go to Settings > Hard Disk and then change the size. Then hit apply. I've gone for 100GB. This will take a little while.

Pasted image712x246 42.7 KB

Once done, time to power on the machine. As soon as you do, make sure you're focussed in the VM window and press ESC as soon as possible to bring up the boot menu.

Once you've got the boot menu, select the CD-ROM drive.

Through booting GParted, just hit enter on the defaults that are already selected. If you've made it through, you'll be looking at this (if not, double click the icon on the desktop):

Pasted image787x630 89.4 KB

You'll want to right click and click Deactivate. Once done, the padlocks disappear.

We can now resize. Select /dev/sda2 and then hit the button.

Either drag the bar all the way to the right, or enter the maximum size under the new size.

Then hit

Hit and then Apply again on the dialog that pops up.

Hit Close on the box that just popped up. Make sure everything looks good, now we're going to do the same, but for /dev/sda5. Just select /dev/sda5, hit and then drag the bar or enter the value manually.

Hit then .

Now right click /dev/sda5 and click Activate.

The padlocks appear again.

You're now done.... for now.

Quit the GParted program and then click on the desktop. Select reboot and let the machine reboot.

Once the machine has booted, log in as normal.

Start a terminal and type:

Type the following:

Welcome to all that new free space.

Confirm it with a good old df -h. Yeah, not seeing yet are we? Well, that's simple to sort.

Now, try!

Enjoy. I hope this is of use to some of you.