Unable to expand vmdk disk capacity

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• Expanding a vmdk fails with "Insufficient disk space on datastore".
• Datastore in question has sufficient free capacity.
• vSphere and Host client UI shows a vmdk size for example 100gb.
• esxi shell shows a mismatched size of 200gb for the initial size instead of 100gb.
  
  • i.e, esxi# ls -lah *.vmdk

 

Environment

vSphere 7

vSphere 8

vSphere 9

Resolution

Clone the vmdk with the vmkfstools option -N to disable native cloning.

esxi# vmkfstools -v 10 -N -i /path/src.vmdk /path/dest.vmdk

Then resize the cloned vmdk.

 

Additional Information

By default, ESXi uses its native methods to perform the cloning operations. If your array supports the cloning technologies, you can off-load the operations to the array. To avoid the ESXi native cloning, specify the -N|--avoidnativeclone option.

Japanese version: vmdk ディスク容量を拡張できません