Hi everyone,

Here’s a little trick I’ve been using for quick deployment of additional virtual disk space to the VMware VMs that comprise the SourceHosting.net service. The VMware Server installation includes the vmware-vdiskmanager tool for creating, renaming, expanding and generally messing about with virtual hard drives.

However, I don’t like running this tool to create a new 50Gb virtual disk in the middle of the day because it just slams the disk I/O channel. To get around the problem, I’ve created several disks of different sizes during off-hours and compressed them down for easy storage. Then when I need to provision a disk, I expand it, rename it and hook it to the virtual machine in Virtual Center:

So here are some compressed disk images for you (SCSI format):

• 10Gb (8391 byte download)
• 20Gb (16415 byte download)
• 50Gb (40373 byte download)
• 100Gb (80373 byte download)

Once downloaded, extract them as follows:

CAUTION: The resulting extracted files will be the actual size represented in the filename. They compress down so well because they are mostly empty space until they are hooked to a VM and a filesystem is created.

After I extract the files, I typically rename the virtual disk to something more meaningful, like the name of the mount point in my VM. This way, I can easily tell which virtual disk is used for what without consulting the VM config file. The disk rename command looks like this:

Simple!

Keep in touch,
Greg
SourceHosting.net, LLC