Extend VMFS Datastore in VMware vShpere

When your VMFS Datastore in VMware ESX 3.x was running out of disk space, you had 2 options. One was to move all of the VM’s on that Datastore to a new VMFS Datastore with more space avaliable or increase the Lun on your storage and add a extend to the excisting Datastore. There are many blog writting if it’s wise to add a extend to a Datastore.

Now with vSphere it’s easy to increase the size of your VMFS Datastore if you have the space avaliable on your lun.

Here my setup. 2 vSphere servers with vCenter installed. I have one Lun on a NetApp. The lun is 15GB big with I created a 10GB VMFS datastore on it.

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Select the properties of the Datastore and click on Increase.

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Notice that on the same Lun the Datastore excits Expandable is marked as: Yes

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You will see the free space avaliable. In my case 5GB.

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Select the size you want to add to the Datastore.

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A summary it displayed. If you agree select Finish.

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When the action is finished you will see that the Capacity is increased. In my case 15GB.

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To prove there is no second partition. Here a screenshot from the Service Console with fdisk (fdisk -l).

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As you can see, now it’s pretty easy to extend a excisting VMFS Datastore.