Hyper-V, Windows Server 2012

Are you fed up with the VHDX disk expansion?

by Manu

Here is a free solution from Systola I used to make VHDX disk expansion life easier.

It’s a common requirement always to increase the disk size, when you want to create more Exchange Databases in a vhdx based disk or a temporary space requirement during your database defragmentation/mailbox move etc.

Traditional method in a Hyper-V environment is go to the VM properties and set the expansion size and wait for hours and hours !! (If you want to expand in TBs)

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Most of the production infrastructures won’t be in a position to give such kind of downtime of the live system. In my case, it was expected to have 20Hours of downtime for a 10TB expansion !!!.

How about, anything which can do the task in seconds 🙂 How the tool achieve this kind of miracle is as they mentioned: ‘This tool did not zero-out the new disk, thus it was lightning fast even while creating multi-gigabyte and terabyte-sized VHDs’. If you can afford this condition, go and download vhdxtool.exe:

I actually followed the method as below:

  • Shutdown the Virtual Machine with vhdx disk you wish to expand.
  • Expand the LUN at your storage. It can be EMC or a local disk
  • From the Hyper-V owner node, refresh disk management to show the added space.
  • Right-click the volume and extend to allocate the added space to the current volume.

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  • Go to the folder in which you extracted the tool (Eg:C:\vhdxtool\vhdxtool.exe)
  • On the owner node, open PowerShell in Administrator mode and run “C:\vhdxtool\vhdxtool.exe extend -f <path to vhdx file> -s <new disk size>”. When you are working with huge TBs, it can expand the Block Allocation Table too. Otherwise, you can’t be able to see the additional message.

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  • Power on the Virtual Machine
  • On the disk management console of the Virtual Machine , make sure that you got the disk expanded. If it’s not, you may want to expand it from there again (Some Hyper-V phenomenon when you use the disk as shared). Right-click the volume and extend to allocate the added space to the current volume.

So, let’s make our life easier with SYSTOLA’s vdhxtool. Thanks SYSTOLA 🙂

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