Adding a new disk to a VMWare Virtual Machine in Linux

Ive been using VMWare for a while now and I always get asked some common questions about
it. One of those is how to add a new virtual disk to a Linux virtual machine. So in response to
that, here are the steps to adding a new SCSI based virtual disk to a CentOS Linux virtual
machine. The steps for adding a disk to a Windows machine is very much the same except you
would use the Disk Management utility from the Control Panel.
Step 1: Open virtual machine settings
Select your virtual machine, as you can see from the photo I selected the Infrastructure virtual
machine. Next press the Edit virtual machine settings to open the Virtual Machine Settings
dialog.

Step 2: Add new hardware

From the Virtual Machine Settings dialog select the Add button at the bottom of the
screen. From this dialog you can also modify how much memory you dedicate to the machine
when it boots.

Step 4: Select new hard disk

From this screen we can see the many types of hardware we can add to a virtual machine. You
can emulate just about any piece of hardware that one can expect in a modern operating system.
It definitely makes testing with different configurations and devices much easier. For our
example we want to select Hard Disk and then select the Next > button.

Step 5: Create the virtual disk

In the next screen we see the three options for adding a new disk. We can Create a new virtual
disk, this will create a brand new disk on the guest operating system. The second option, Use
an existing virtual disk, allows you to mount a disk from another virtual machine. I like to do
this with my source drive. I have one virtual disk that Ive made that has all the Oracle and
Linux CDs on it, that way I can just mount it to the machine I need when I have to do a new
install instead of copying the binaries I need across disks, its definitely a big time saver. The last
option is to Use a physical disk, this allows you to mount a local physical disk to the operating
system. This option is akin to NFS mounting a drive to a virtual machine. To add a new disk we
select the Create a new virtual disk option and select the Next > button.

Step 6: Select type of disk

Next we want to select the type of disk. Ive been using VMWare for a long time and agree that
the recommended Virtual Disk Type should be SCSI. I dont know why, but Ive had much better
success with the SCSI virtual disks than the IDE ones. So in this step we want to select SCSI
(Recommended) and the Next > button.

Step 7: Set disk size and options

Now we want to set the size of the disk we are creating. One of the nice features of VMWare is
that you dont have to allocate all of the disk when you create it. So if you create a 40 GB disk it
doesnt have to take it all right away, the disk will grow as your virtual machine needs it. I will
say this is a big performance hit you take when the disk has to extend, but for most applications
its OK. Also, I will warn that if the virtual disk grows and there is no physical disk left on the
host operating system you will see a catastrophic failure and in most cases both the host and
guest operating systems lock up and become unusable. (Dont say I didnt warn you) Lastly, you
can split the files into 2GB sizes, while this isnt necessary, it just makes all the disks much
easier to manage and move around. For this step we want to set our disk size (12 GB in this
case), I chose not to allocate the disk space right now (the machine has a 300 GB drive and has
only 20 GB on it) and Split disk into 2 GB files.

Step 8: Name the disk file

This is actually pretty simple in that you decide what you want to physically call the disk and
where to put it. .vmdk is the extension for VMWare virtual disks. After we name the disk we can
select the Finish button which adds the disk to the virtual machine.

Step 9: Ensure new disk exists

So now we can see that the new disk has been added to the Virtual Machine Settings within the
selected virtual machine. From here the disk acts just like it would if you added a new disk to a
standalone server. So we select the OK button to continue.

Step 10: Boot the virtual machine

From here we just start the virtual machine like we would normally, either by selecting the
button on the toolbar or selecting the Start this virtual machine link.

Step 11: Virtual machine start up

The machine boots normally as it would any other time.

Step 12: Create the Partition

After weve logged in and accessed a terminal window as root (or another user with root/sudo
privs) we first want to run fdisk on the newly created drive. In Linux the first SCSI drive is sda,
the second sdb, the third sdc, etc. since this was the second SCSI drive we added to the system,
the device is known as /dev/sdb
The first command we want to run is fdisk /dev/sdb (NOTE: Thanks to everyone that caught
my typo here) this utility works very much like the DOS utility of the old days and allows you to
create and manage partitions. To create a new partition we enter the command n to create a new
partition. This is going to be a primary partition p, and the first partition number 1. Because I
want this disk to consume the full 12 GB I specified earlier we start at the first cylinder and end
it at the last cylinder. We then want to write the partition table with the new partition we have just
created so we enter the command w which writes the new table and exits fdisk.

Step 13: Format the partition

Now that weve create the partition, we now want to format the first with the new file system.
Ive decided to use ext3 filesystem for this disk, ext3 provides all the features of the classic ext2
file system plus journaling which helps to prevent disk corruption in the event of an improper
shutdown and speeds up the recovery process. For a good overview of Linux standard file
systems check out this article: http://linux.org.mt/article/filesystems So, to format the new
partition we enter the command mkfs -t ext3 /dev/sdb1. This command makes a new files
system with the type t ext3 on the /dev/sdb1 partition, this is the first partition on the sdb disk.

Step 14: Create the mount point

Determine where you want to add the new virtual disk youve created. I like to create a partition
specifically for all the software I install after the basic Linux install called /software to do that
we run mkdir /software, just a simple make directory command. Once that is complete we
then want to mount the newly created partition. Because we havent added the partition to the
/etc/fstab yet we have to mount it manually. To do that we run mount -t ext3
/dev/sdb1 /software. To break down this command we run mount with the ext3 filesystem
type, the partition /dev/sdb1 to the directory /software. Pretty simple and straight forward. To
check that the partition is properly mounted we run df -k which shows us the mounted

partitions and the amount of available space.

Step 15: Open the fstab file

The fstab file holds all of the used disks and partitions, and determines how they are supposed to
be used by the operating system. So we edit the file to add the newly created partition
http://www.matttopper.com/images/blog/adding_disk_to_vmware/15.jpg
Step 16: Modify the fstab for the new partition
After we open the fstab file in the previous step we add the following line:
/dev/sdb1 /software ext3 defaults 1 1

The first column is the partition name, the second is the default mount point, the third is the
filesystem type. The fourth is the mount options, in this case I used default which mounts the
drive rw, suid, dev, exec, auto, nouser and asynchronous. The 5th and 6th options are for the
dump and fsck options. If dump is set to 1 the filesystem is marked to be backed up, if you are
going to have sensitive material on the drive its a good idea to set it to 1. If fsck is set to greater
than 1, then the operating system uses the number to determine in what order fsck should be run
during start up. If it is set to 0 it will be ignored such as in the case of a cdrom drive since its a
solid state disk. For more information on the fstab file check out this article:
http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/fstab.html
Lastly, we write and quit the file with the :wq command.

So now that the fstab has been written the drive will be mounted and unmounted when the
machine is either started or shutdown. So there you have it, the quick and dirty process for
adding a brand new disk to a virtual machine. Until next time