The best thing I’ve found all year….
A couple of weeks ago I was asking my buddies on Tweet what their favourite way of repartitioning disks were. You know making a partition (any partition whether it it be the C: or D: drive) larger – ideally with the fewest simplest steps. For some years I’ve been using QParted from the rather excellent Xnoppix Live CD – and it still have some merits because it will more or less work with any guest operating system. But to be honest that’s becoming quite tenious as most of my VMs actually run Windows.
Anyway, Eric Sloof (http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/) put me on to Dell Utility called extpart.exe available from here:
http://ftp.us.dell.com/app/ExtPart.exe
If you are using ESX4/vCenter you can increase the virtual disk whilst the VM is powered on (if your using vi3.5 you’ll you have to power it off) say from 4096 to 10096, thus adding an extra 6000MB to the virtual disk. Once you have downloaded and installed extpart to the VM you can use the command:
extpart c: 6000
To increase the size of the partition. Now all I have to do is make this one continious process! Click a spinner to make a virtual disk big and as if by magic the partition is also the same size. Needless to say I’ve made extpart.exe a standard part of my VM builds…
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July 3rd, 2009 at 7:18 pm
Hi Mike,
In 3.5 you can increase disk sizes live (perhaps not in 3.0).
I’m just wondering, what benefit does ExtPart have over DiskPart? With Diskpart you can grow partitions live (except for the system drive and drives with swap on it – normally this won’t effect you data drives though on a server).
Forbes
July 3rd, 2009 at 7:40 pm
Great utility. Windows 2008 has this capability built in now, finally.
July 3rd, 2009 at 7:41 pm
This works on ESX 3.5 U2 as well.
July 3rd, 2009 at 7:55 pm
Thanks for reffering Mike, I created a little demo movie at : http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1022-Pump-Up-the-Volume.html
July 3rd, 2009 at 8:33 pm
Best thing that extpart has over diskpart… erm. that you can make the system drive bigger… plus this actually grows the partition rather than creating those ugly volume set/spanned volumes…
July 3rd, 2009 at 9:22 pm
Grin, used extpart today to increase the system partition of two windows 2003 machines I created from a template
Have used it manys times already. Only thing missing could be an option to just max out on the capacity, that would make it even easier 
July 3rd, 2009 at 11:21 pm
diskpart does not create volume sets or spanned volumes…it grows the partition. However I will test extpart to see if it can truly expand a system drive while it is live…this would be a neat trick and well worth using. Right now we mount our system drives to a spare 2003 vm and run diskpart on them to expand them when we absolutely need to grow a system volume.
July 4th, 2009 at 8:46 am
Diskpart extends basic disk partitions cleanly. Extending simple volumes on dynamic disks results in multiple volumes/extents visible in the disk mgmt console. But then why use dynamic disks?
July 5th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
[...] was reading through my rss feeds this weekend and came across a post entitled ‘The best thing I’ve found all year….’ by one of the top vm bloggers. So I had to check it out. He was posting about a Dell tool that [...]
July 8th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
For Diskpart I think its basically an extent? but this is how you would do that:
cmd
diskpart
list volume
select volume
extend -OR- extent size= disk=
exit
July 8th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Darn, it cut off a bit there here it is again:
cmd
diskpart
list volume
select volume ‘volume number’
extend
or
extent size=’size in MB’ disk=’disk number’
exit
November 3rd, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Thanks for this one! Comes in very handy and much more easy to use compared to those bootable disks…