I was under impression that once created a virtual hard drive for VMWare (Workstation) cannot be resized. Not quite.

What you can’t do is resize a hard drive of an VM which is a base for clones without getting rid of all clones and snapshots first. Then just run this command (extending the drive to 16GB, replace myDisk with the name of your disk and 16 with the number of GB you need)

vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -x 16Gb myDisk.vmdk

It’s not finished yet. The problem is that the partitions on the virtual drive are still the same as they were. What you most likely want to do is to resize the partition(s) to match the disk size. If you’re on Windows XP, this might be tricky – the built-in disk manager will not allow you to do this from a GUI.

Fortunately, there is a very elegant solution that’s very easy to use that I mentioned before – GParted. Download the CD image, burn to CD, boot the VM from it and resize the partition.

Note to self: next time create a VM with a large disk size – it expands anyway and only consumes as much real disk space as necessary.