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I was reading the old vmblog.com today and ran across a new tool that appears useful. I’m going to be upgrading from 3.0.2 -> 3.5 soon and I can see an immediate use for this tool. RVTools can be used to read the vmware tools version installed on all your Vmware guest servers if you point the tool at your Virtual Center server. There are a few other fields that are brought down as well. I use the notes field to populate backup information for the guest and that came down nicely with the tool.

After you read the version installed you can even select which VM’s if any you would like to upgrade which looks very convenient. Here’s the post I read…

http://vmblog.com/archive/2008/05/12/3rd-party-rvtools-for-vmware-updated-to-version-1-1.aspx

or go to the horse’s mouth right here:

http://rvtools.deveij.com/

Use putty or ssh to connect one of the hosts that can access the files of the vm guest you’d like to work with.  Browse to the location of the vm guest on your SAN or disk.

Only 1, yes one command on the vmware side to extend or expand the disk.  Please power your VM guest down before attempting this…

vmkfstools -X 15G disk1.vmdk (where 15G is the final size you want the disk to expand too).

Now if this is the O/S drive for a guest VM you’ll need to use the VI3 client to attach the VMDK to another VM as a second hard drive.  This is only for a few minutes so that you can run diskpart from within windows.  Diskpart is not allowed to run on an O/S partition.

After you’ve added the drive as a second drive to another helper VM you can run the following commands.  If the drive is already a second drive you don’t have to add it to a helper VM.

Open a windows cmd prompt and enter the following…

1)diskpart.exe
2)list disk
3)list volume
4)select volume=#   (where # = the volume you need to expand)
5)extend

Don’t forget to detach the vmdk from your helper vm!