I do this type of maintenance all the time. Usually on Windows 2008 R2 servers where I can just go to the VM > Edit Settings > Hard Drive and expand it to my pleasure and then add the space to the host "hot" without need to reboot or use third party "boot" tools to expand (ie. GParted).
We run vSphere 5.0. The VM for this case is a Win2k8 R2 64-bit on a 4.1 host. Our datastores are NFS volumes on NetApp storage infrastructure. Now this is the issue:
On the same datastore, same OS (2k8 R2) I can change the settings on some VMs to increase the disk space and on others I can't. This is:
- same datastore (NFS - yes, there is enough space to grow)
- different hosts
- same OS
- all of them are set for Thin Provisioning
- vmware tools are running and up to date
For some reason some VMs allow me to grow their Hard Drive (size available xxx.xxGB) and others don't let me grow (size available N/A): the option to click the arrows to grow the hard drive is grayed out.
Ideas?
Thanks!
Alex