This article guides you through the process of increasing the size of a virtual disk for a virtual machine. This procedure is necessary if you need to store more data on your virtual machine than it can currently hold.
Notes:
It is not possible to decrease the size of a virtual disk, if an operating system is installed on it.
The Boot Camp partition does not have a virtual disk -- it runs off the partition of the physical disk. To increase the size of the Boot Camp partition virtual machine's disk, you need to import the Boot Camp partition into a virtual machine first. For details, see Importing a Boot Camp partition in VMware Fusion (1015088).
This article consists of two parts. After following the steps to increase the size of your virtual disk, the size of the disk partition does not increase inside the guest operating system. You must follow steps related to your specific operating system to increase the size of the disk partition(s) there.
The virtual machine is powered off (and not just suspended).
Increasing the size of the virtual disk
To increase the size of the virtual disk:
Open Fusion.
Select the virtual machine in the Virtual Machine Library.
Go to Virtual Machine > Settings....
Click Hard Disk(s).
Use the slider to adjust the size of the virtual disk.
Click Apply.
Note: Ensure that you have enough free space available on the physical disk to perform the operation. The free disk required is equal to the current.vmdk size. For example: If the vmdk is 20GB in size and you want to increase it to 30GB (a 10GB increase), you will require 20GB + 10GB free space on the physical disk.
Increasing the size of the disk partition in your operating system
Note: In Fusion 4.x and above versions, a Windows XP or newer virtual machine automatically re-sizes on first boot after increasing the disk size in the virtual machine settings.
Note: The preceding link was correct as of September 9, 2013. If you find the link is broken, provide feedback and a VMware employee will update the link.