Unable To Expand Virtual Disk In VMware vSphere Greyed Out – Solved

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Welcome to this short blog post to fix the issue of unable to expand virtual disk(vDisk) in VMware vSphere for a virtual machine. In this blog I’ll let you how you can fix it easily.

In our daily routine task on virtual machines that are hosted on the VMware platform needed to resize the virtual machine resources as per the customer requirements. But sometimes you can not increase the vDisk size due to one of the following issues:

  1. Your ESXi host datastore does not have enough free space available for use.
  2. You do not have sufficient permission to perform the disks expansion task.
  3. Underlying datastore is not healthy or not connected well with ESXi hosts.
  4. Any image-level backup job is running in background following a snapshot creation for the virtual machine. Because in these cases virtual machine files are locked up to avoid any online modification.

Expand the vDisk in VMware vSphere

To fix this, you have to wait till the backup job done and the snapshot gets deleted automatically. Otherwise, you should go ahead and kill the backup job and delete the snapshot manually. As per my experience, after deleting the snapshot virtual machine will show a warning to perform a disk consolidation in vSphere.

You have to do the disk consolidation, but mostly it will fail to state that files are locked up and can not release it. To fix this issue, you have to go to the proxy backup machine and remove any disks attached to the proxy device. Make sure you do not delete it from the disk just remove it and click ok. Now try to perform the disk consolidation, it should be successful without any issue.

Wait till the task gets completed. Now you can check and edit the virtual machine settings to modify the vDisks.

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