Embedded Man

Yesterday I posted a tutorial on how to create virtual machines.  I wrote about how vms can be handy tools especially to us developers who sometimes need two or more OSes at once.  I also wrote about how virtual machines mimic real physical machines in many ways.  One of those ways is how virtual machines have limited disk sizes.  When you buy a real computer you choose a hard disk size and that’s all you get until you upgrade.  If you purchase the VMWare Workstation tool you will have the ability to resize your virtual hard disk but if you created a vm using free tools like I did there was no way to increase the disk size.  That is until now.

Say whaaaaaat?

Yup, yesterday after posting my tutorial I installed Visual Studio on my Xp vm and, since I had two disk drives, I thought I would be smart and tell VS to install itself on the larger drive.  Well little did I know that VS has a mind of it’s own and it installed only part of the application on the the larger drive.  The other, and larger, part of the application was installed on the smaller drive (yikes).  So here I was with a new vm with only one application installed and already I was running into disk issues.

So that got me off on a quest for a free tool that would allow me to increase the size of my vm’s disk drive.  And lo and behold I found it where I least expected:  at the VMWare site.  It turns out that VMWare has a tool called VMWare Converter that will allow you to not only convert vms created with VMWare Workstation but also third party tools–YES!!

Of course, as is procedure at VMWare, you have to register before downloading the tool but having your name on a mailing list is a small price to pay for this tool.  Once you download and install you run the tool and it gives you a nice welcome screen as in Figure 1.

Figure 1

If you click on the Next button a couple of times it will take you to the Source Type window.  Here you will want to select Other from the drop down list.

Figure 2

Click on the Next button and that will take you to the window where you can select the virtual machine you want to convert.  Here you can either type the name if you know the path or just click on the Browse button and navigate to the vm location.

Figure 3

Click on the Next button and the converter will start to crunch on your existing vm to extract all the data.  When it’s done, you will go to the Source Data window.  Here you must make sure to place a check mark next to all the listed hard drives and this is the most important window of all because here is where you can select a new size for your hard drive.

Figure 4

Select the drop down list next to the hard drive you want to expand and select the option to specify the size in GB.  Now you can type in the new desired size.  The original disk in this example was 4.7 GB and I increased it to 10GB.  Click on the Next button twice and you will be taken to a window where you can specify the destination type (Figure 5).

Figure 5

Select Other from the drop down list and then click the Next button.  Now you will come to a window where you can specify the name of the new virtual machine.  Remember that this is a converter tool.  It will leave your original virtual machine intact but it will create a new one based on your specifications and it will even copy all of the data from the old vm to the new one.  Cool huh?

Figure 6

Click on the Next button and an Virtual Machine Options will appear.  Here you can specify how you want the new hard drive(s) to be persisted on the host machine.  It’s true that if you select to have the drive created at this point in the process it will have better performance.  You can also get better performance by having the hard disk divided into 2 GB blocks.  For my purposes, I chose to leave it as is.

Figure 7

Click the Next button and you will see a window for Network options.  Here I just selected the default.

Figure 8

Click Next for the Customization window.  Here I put a check mark next to Install VMWare Tools.  You’ll need those in order to cut and paste from your virtual machine to other virtual machines or the host.  I also put a check mark next to the option to Remove all Restore checkpoints but that’s not necessary.

Figure 9

Now if you click Next and then Finish the converter will go to work on your new creation.  Note that this might take some time.  On my laptop, which has 4 GB of ram and a Core Duo 2 processor, it took about 30 minutes to churn out the new vm.  Still, that’s time worth the wait since you will now be able to upgrade all those old vms with smaller drives.  Of course your are limited by the available space on your real physical drive but this is a really neat tool that will have lots of vmers smiling for a while.

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