You can add, remove, and resize virtual hard disks.

If you want to add more disk space to your virtual machine, you can resize your existing virtual hard disk, or add a separate, additional hard disk.

Note

Having manual or AutoProtect snapshots in your virtual machine prevents you from making changes to a virtual hard disk. You must delete the snapshots before you can make a change.

Caution

In the following situations, after you select a bus type for a virtual hard disk, do not change the bus type.

On a system boot disk with the operating system installed

Some operating systems are incapable of changing the storage controller of the boot device.

A virtual machine created using Easy Install

When you select Customize Settings at the end of an Easy Install configuration and change the hard disk to a non-default bus type, the operating system might fail.

You might require more disk space in a virtual machine. For example, if you want to install a large application or work with a large number of files. You can increase the size of the virtual disk already associated with your virtual machine, or you can add a new virtual disk. You can create a virtual hard disk to add to a virtual machine.

You can increase the usable space in a virtual hard disk. You cannot reduce the size of a hard disk. You cannot make a blank hard disk smaller after it has been formatted.

When you enlarge your virtual hard disk, you must also enlarge your guest operating system's partition to take advantage of the additional space.

You can perform a manual or automated cleanup of certain virtual machines to free up space on your Mac. The cleanup compacts and defragments the virtual machine.

You can add an existing virtual hard disk to a virtual machine. You can copy or move the disk to your virtual machine, or share it between virtual machines.

You can add a virtual hard disk and select a disk image on a virtual machine hosted on a remote server.

You can remove a virtual hard disk from your virtual machine.

Virtual Disk Manager (vmware-vdiskmanager) is a Fusion utility that you can use to create, manage, and modify virtual disk files from the command line or in scripts.