Editing "hardware parameters" on existing VM.

[DeaconFrost]

I have a Dell PowerEdge R710 running several VMs right now, on ESXi 4.0. The VMs are all Windows Server 2008 R2. I have two questions:

1. Would I have any issues with increasing the amount of memory available to a VM, form say, 2 GB ot 4 GB? This assumes I have the memory free to allocate, and that I would first shut down the VM.

2. If I had a 100 GB "D drive" created in a VM, as a separate hard disk file, can that be increased the same way? Meaning, if I shut down the VM first, would I have to delete the old drive and recreate a larger one, or can I expland the size of the hard disk file without a loss of data, then just boot up the VM again to see the larger disk?

 

[Vader]

1. No issues.
2. No issues. Increase the size of your disk in vSphere, then, within the guest, expand the disk in storage manager or using diskpart in Windows after you expand the disk on the vSphere side. You may be aware, sometimes you have to rescan the disks to see the additional capacity within Windows Server 2008 R2 to be able to add it.

 

[Eulogy]

The only "odd" thing I've run into is when I've increased RAM on Server2008 R2 VMs is occasionally I get prompted to re-activate. A trivial issue, but something I've had happen a couple of times. One I went from 2GB to 8GB, the other I went from 4GB to 16GB.

 

[DeaconFrost]

Thanks to both of you! Eulogy, I've gotten that "issue" on Windows 7 clients before as well. If that's the worst hurdle I come across, I'll be thrilled.

 

[lopoetve]

Those should both work without a single hitch.

 

[Eulogy]

If you had vSphere Enterprise, you can hot add Ram and HDD space too I love doing that... change hardware with no downtime? YES PLEASE.