Resize VMWare Disk size

VMWare provides an option to resize the Hard disk of a VM. The Settings dialog provides this option under Hard Disk. If the VM is not running and you don’t have a snapshot, the slider is enabled, and you can size the disk to your desired size.

I wanted to increase the size of the hard disk from 50 GB to 100 GB. That’s a matter of seconds, and I was ready to go.

I’ve launched the VM image and checked the hard disk size. To my surprise, the size was still 50 GB and not the promised 100 GB.

What happened

The request to change the hard disk size didn’t make it to macOS. I started to examine the disk with diskutil.

lab-vm: user$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *107.4 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk1          50.2 GB   disk0s2

/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                       +50.2 GB   disk1
                                 Physical Store disk0s2
   1:                APFS Volume macOS 10.13             23.2 GB    disk1s1
   2:                APFS Volume Preboot                 18.6 MB    disk1s2
   3:                APFS Volume Recovery                509.8 MB   disk1s3
   4:                APFS Volume VM                      20.5 KB    disk1s4

Well, the size was changed successfully. That’s good to see. But the reported size for the disk was still 50 GB. I noticed the Container disk1. This one had the reported size of 50 GB. It looks like; this has to be changed to make use of all the available space of that hard disk. After reading a little bit about APFS and how to deal with APFS, I learned that the hard disk is called a Volume. A Volume can have multiple containers.

I found this command to change the size of the container to grow and use all the available space of the Volume (I had sweaty palms)

diskutil apfs resizeContainer /dev/disk1 0

Break down of the command, and its arguments,

• diskutil apfs => tell diskutil that we are gonna modify something that has an APFS filesystem
• resizeContainer /dev/disk1 0 => resize container /dev/disk1 and grow to the maximum available space (0)

Not bad! That worked smoother than expected. Now I have the full 100 GB available and can continue filling it up. :-)

Thanks for reading. I hope it’s helpful.

Feel free to share and leave a comment. I’m happy to learn about your experience.