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.

SIOCSIFADDR: No such device eth0
eth0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device

When I ran ifconfig only lo showed up. No eth0 to be seen anywhere. After hunting around the net for a few minutes I came across some tips that helped.

First I ran:
ifconfig -a

This showed me two adapters – lo and eth2. Aha!

sudo ifconfig eth2 up brought the interface up for me, and sudo dhclient got me an ipaddress, but after rebooting the problem came back.

Next step was to edit this file:
/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

Looking at that file, I could see my adapter listed as well as a couple others. I commented out the ones with the wrong MAC address, found the correct one and changed the entry for eth2 to eth0.

I rebooted and everything was gold.

Thank you Google.

In computing, the iSCSI (for “Internet SCSI“) protocol allows clients (called initiators) to send SCSI commands (CDBs) to SCSI storage devices (targets) on remote servers. It is a popular Storage Area Network (SAN) protocol, allowing organizations to consolidate storage into data center storage arrays while providing hosts (such as database and web servers) with the illusion of locally-attached disks.

There are a number of high-end hardware/software solutions you can use, but if you’ve got a small home or office network that you need to add some storage to and you have a spare PC laying around, you should be able to add quite a bit of storage on the cheap.

I won’t go into all the dirty details of how to set this up, but here’s basically what I did to test this with VMWare:

• First I loaded Vmware ESXi on a spare server with only a very small hard drive and dual GB NICs. Got it up and running and manageable with VMware infrastructure client.
• Next, I found a spare PC with a Gigabit NICand threw an extra IDE hard drive in it. It now had a 30GB and a 80GB hard drive in it. I downloaded OPENFILER and installed it on the 30GB hard drive. OpenFiler allows you to share hard drive space to your network clients in a variety of different ways including NFS, SMB, and for this test – iSCSI.  No problems. It found all my important hardware – NIC, Drives, etc.,
• I decided I would carve the 80GB disk into two “volumes” for this test. 30 GB which I shared via iSCSI. and 50GB which I shared as SMB (Windows).
• There are a few steps to creating the iSCSI target on OPENFILER  which I’ll post some other time. In VMWARE I configured the  iSCSI Software Adapter to point to the OPENFILER address and like magic , the ESX server has 30GB of usable space to build VM’s on. Nice! Windows, Linux, and OSX all have free iSCSI software initiators so I could have just as easily have test with either of them.
• I created another 50GB EXT3 volume in OPENFILER, turned on SMB/CIFS service, configured the SMB share, and then it showed up on my network as \\ipaddress\share.  Sweet!
• I went through the usual steps of installing Windows in the new iSCSI attached space and it worked fine. In the real world, you’d use dedicated NIC’s, perhaps Gigabit switches, redundant hard drives, authentication, etc., but for my test I think the performance was adequate, and I got a good feel for how to configure the different pieces of software.

OpenFiler also supports all kinds of nifty features like replication, snapshots, High Availability, etc., Did I mention it’s FREE?  Go Get OPENFILER….

http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/