I recently increased my VMWare disk image size from 10 to 15 GB. It was actually less problematic than I thought, although VMWare doesn’t support the process end to end.

The steps you have to go through are:

1. Locate vmware-vdiskmanager.exe which, on my machine, is in C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Workstation.
2. Using the examples here together with the /? switch, the program can be invokes like:

   vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -x 15GB "path to image.vmdk"
   

   to make the new image 15 GB of size. During the enlargement process the tool creates a temporary copy the image, so you must have sufficient space on your host environment for this. Also note that this example doesn’t preallocate disk space. What this means is that although the size is logically increased to 15 GB, the image doesn’t initially grow larger on disk.

3. Now the image can contain 15 GB of data, but the guest operation system doesn’t automatically pick up the change in disk size. If you boot Windows, it’ll tell you the disk size is 10 GB, the size the disk had when Windows was installed on it. Therefore, we need to use PartitionMagic or simular tool to make Windows adjust as discribed here.

All in all the process took roughly 80 minutes on my laptop. Unfortunately, it didn’t make Visual Studio 2005 run any faster than on the W2k3 server running out of disk space. I guess the dramatic slowdown is just a necessary evil of running Visual Studio 2005 in a virtualized environment on a laptop as the development environment is not the fastest running on native hardware either.