How to add a new virtual disk in VMWare

VMware as most of you know is the leader in desktop and server virtualization technology. Some of you might have even played with its turnkey and free virtual appliances. This is a begginer level article and in this step by step tutorial we will demonstrate how to add another virtual disk (hard drive) to an existing VMware virtual machine.

In our example we have a preconfigured Virtual machine that is running the popular FreeNas NAS server. We need to add another disk to this virtual server, the disk of our choice is an IDE disk but you can choose a SCSI disk as well. Also, we are demonstrating here as to how to add a virtual hard disk to the FreeNAS Virtual Machine, but the procedure to add a hard drive is the same for any virtual machine in Vmware

Step 1:

- Connect to the console of your VMWare server and click on the tab of your Virtual Machine you want to make changes to, then click on "Edit virtual machine settings"

Step 2:

- On the Hardware tab, click the Add button

Step 3:

- Click Next on the Wizard to start

Step 4:

- On the "Hardware Type" highlight Hard drive and click next

Step 5:

- Choose "create a new virtual disk"

Step 6:

- Choose IDE (its recommended you choose the same disk type as your other virtual disk present on the Virtual Machine, in this case its IDE)

Step 7:

- Specify a size for your hard drive, (eg; 8 Gigabytes), we also chose to "Allocate All disk space now" as it enhances performance, the other option would have been to split the disk size in 2 Gigabyte chunks

Step 8:

- Provide a folder path location and the name for the virtual disk

Step 9:

- The next step here shows the details of the new disk drive that you have added.