Expanding an EXT3 partition in a Virtual Machine

This is a pretty simply task and applicable to any major partition type (NTFS, FAT32, et cetera) but can be a little daunting for first timers. I recently had the need to expand an EXT3 partition in my UNNOC appliance appliance as the MySQL database had filled up the / partition. By issuing the proper vmkfstools -X command the disk will be expanded in size, but the partition will not automatically “fill” the new space. To expand the partition we will use a must-have for any VMWare admin, the Systems Rescue CD.

After booting from the .iso, you will be presented with the main menu:

Simply hit ENTER to continue the booting process.

After a few seconds you will be greeted by a prompt, type, startx to fire up the GUI.

Once the GUI is loaded it’s time to fire up our trusty partition tool, GPartEd.

• /dev/sda1 is the swap partition. We’re not concerned with this at the moment.
• /dev/sda2 is our root partition. This is the one that we want to expand.

Here we see the unused space (23GB) that we gained by expanding the virtual disk.

There are a few ways you can expand the /dev/sda2 partition, I chose to “drag” the partition to fill up the remaining space.

Click apply and away it goes.

Now reboot your machine into your OS and enjoy your new space.

- Jason

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