Craig Mayhew’s Blog

1. Login to your vmware server.
3. Backup your virtual machine and all snapshots (The raw files on the physical disk – particularly the vmdk files as this will be what we are modifying)
4. Login to vmware gui.
5. Power off your virtual machine (do not pause it!).
6. Delete all snapshots for this machine
7. Locate vmware-vdiskmanager.exe and adjust paths to run the following command (Change sie in GB as you require):
8. C:\Users\user>”C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Server\vmware-vdiskmanager.exe” -x 1000GB “D:\Windows 7\Windows 7.vmdk”
9. Once that has run (it will take some time). Try powering on your virtual machine (mine crashed the first time around when I logged in via remote desktop but was fine after logging in via vmware browser plugin).
10. Once logged into the windows 7 virtual machine: Open control panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management
11. In the left menu click Storage -> Disk Manager
12. You should see your drives with blue bars. Your C drive should have a block of unpartitioned space that was created by the vdiskmanager in the previous steps. Right click on C drive and click “extend volume”.
13. Follow the prompts – default values should be fine
14. Done

I upgraded the VMWare server to Ubuntu Lucid Lynx. You need to reinstall the VMWare server again. Here’s the guide which is the same as for the previous upgrade to Karmic:

Download VMware Server (2.0.1 or 2.0.2) – in gz format. You will also need a license key.

If you have tried to install vmware server already and something went wrong during the install, then do these two steps first:

first, delete the vmware modules

rm -rf /usr/lib/vmware/modules/

if needed (you’ll know if you need to do this one and you need to changethe version “2.6.31-13″ to the one your running.):

rm -rf /lib/modules/2.6.31-13-server/misc/vm*

Install:

Run vmware-install.pl. Somewhere in the installation process you should be asked:
Do you want this program to invoke the command for you now? [yes]
you should answer: no

Then run the patch vmware-server.2.0.1_x64-modules-2.6.30.4-fix.sh.

sudo ./vmware-server.2.0.1_x64-modules-2.6.30.4-fix.sh

After this, run

/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

If the vmware-config.pl aborts, because it couldn’t shut down all vmware services then kill them manually and then rerun vmware-config.pl:

kill -9 $( grep -i vm | awk '{ print $2 }' )

And hopefully that should work!

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu Karmic Koala and fully expected this to break my VMWare server install. Sure enough I got plenty of errors when trying to compile VMWare Server with the latest kernel. Here’s the solution:

Download VMware Server (2.0.1 or 2.0.2) – in gz format. You will also need a license key.

If you have tried to install vmware server already and something went wrong during the install, then do these two steps first:

first, delete the vmware modules

rm -rf /usr/lib/vmware/modules/

if needed (you’ll know if you need to do this one):

rm -rf /lib/modules/2.6.31-13-server/misc/vm*

Install:

Run vmware-install.pl. Somewhere in the installation process you should be asked:
Do you want this program to invoke the command for you now? [yes]
you should answer: no

Then run the patch vmware-server.2.0.1_x64-modules-2.6.30.4-fix.sh.

sudo ./vmware-server.2.0.1_x64-modules-2.6.30.4-fix.sh

After this, run

/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

If the vmware-config.pl aborts, because it couldn’t shut down all vmware services then kill them manually and then rerun vmware-config.pl:

kill -9 $( grep -i vm | awk '{ print $2 }' )

And hopefully that should work!