First, shut down the virtual guest with the full hard drive. Once it’s shut down, commit any snapshots to disk by deleting all snapshots in the snapshot manager.

Connect to your ESX server host via console or ssh, and navigate to the directory where the .vmdk files reside for this guest. Decide on a size that you want to increase your hard drive to. Make sure to leave room for future services packs and patches, etc.,

type this:

vmkfstools t -X 50g myvmguest.vmdk

Replace myvmguest with the appropriate vmdk file name and replace 50g with the appropriate size for your environment.

It should only take a second or two, as all its doing is making a change to the file’s header so it thinks its now larger than it was.

Now, go grab a copy of GPARTED here. Download the ISO. In the CD-ROM Settings for your Virtual Guest, point it to the ISO you just downloaded. You may need to SCP this file to the server. Make sure its set to CONNECTED and CONNECT AT STARTUP.

Now power on the virtual guest, but quickly get keyboard control and hit ESC to choose another boot device. Choose CD and the GPARTED live CD should fire up.

Answer the keyboard questions when they come up. After a minute or so, GPARTED should load up and discover your hard drives automatically.

You should see a visual representation of your boot drive now, with a bunch of free space at the endthe partition. Right-click on the partition and choose Resize/Move. Drag the slider to increase the partition to the new size. Click Resize. Click Apply at the top. Depending on the size of your partition, this may take a while. Check the progress, and when its done, quit, reboot back into Windows.

Your boot drive should now be larger.  No charge.

WinDirStat

Here are three FREE tools you can use- one for each OS- Windows, OSX and Linux. They are all fairly similar.

WindirStat (Windows) – Great graphical disk analysis tool. Lots of custom settings like # of threads, color coding, etc.,This program is fast. Its good for running against a shared directory to see who’s taking up all the disk space.

Disk Inventory X (OSX) – The author says that this was written to be like WindirStat, so its basically the same thing. Although it doens’t seem quite as feature rich. Gets the job done on a Mac.

Disk Inventory X

KDirstat (Linux) – Supposedly, Windirstat is a clone of this bit of software. Although it’s a KDE program it will run in any X11 environment.

KDirStat

All three of these programs can help recover disk space, and keep that old hard dirve from filling up quite as fast.