Expanding an ESX 3.5 VM Disk (vmdk) without VirtualCenter

If you need to expand an existing virtual machines disk (.vmdk) and you do not have VMware VirtualCenter, use the vmkfstools command. You will need to SSH to the physical ESX server. I use PuTTY (http://www.putty.org/) to SSH to the ESX servers. Once connected to the ESX server and cd'd to the desired VM directory, run the vmkfstools command with the following syntax:

vmkfstools -X <size> G <.vmdk file name>

Example: To expand the disk for the VM with the Windows Server 2008.vmdk to 100GB run the following:

vmkfstools -X 100G Windows Server 2008.vmdk