Add a New Virtual Hard Disk to a Virtual Machine

To increase storage space, you can add a new virtual hard disk to a virtual machine. You can add up to four IDE devices and up to 60 SCSI devices. Any of these devices can be a virtual or physical hard disk or DVD or CD-ROM drive.

Virtual hard disks are stored as files on the host computer or on a network file server. A virtual IDE drive or SCSI drive can be stored on a physical IDE drive or on a physical SCSI drive.

As an alternative to adding a new virtual hard disk, you can expand the existing virtual hard disk. See Expand a Virtual Hard Disk.

Procedure

1. Select the virtual machine and select VM > Settings.
2. On the Hardware tab, click Add.
3. In the New Hardware wizard, select Hard Disk.
4. Select Create a new virtual disk.
5. Select the disk type.

   Option	Description
   IDE	Create an IDE device. You can add up to four IDE devices to a virtual machine.
   SCSI	Create a SCSI device. You can add up to 60 SCSI devices to a virtual machine.
   SATA	Create a SATA device. You can add up to 120 SATA devices: four controllers and 30 devices per controller.

6. (Optional) To exclude the disk from snapshots, select Independent for the mode and select a persistence option.

   Option	Description
   Persistent	Disks in persistent mode behave like conventional disks on a physical computer. All data written to a disk in persistent mode is written permanently to the disk.
   Nonpersistent	Changes to disks in nonpersistent mode are discarded when you power off or reset the virtual machine. With nonpersistent mode, you always restart the virtual machine with a virtual disk in the same state. Changes to the disk are written to and read from a redo log file that is deleted when you power off or reset the virtual machine.

7. Set the capacity for the new virtual hard disk.

   You can set a size between 0.001 GB and 8 TB for a virtual disk.

8. Specify how to allocate the disk space.

   Option	Description
   Allocate all disk space now	Allocating all of the disk space when you create the virtual hard disk can enhance performance, but it requires all of the physical disk space to be available now. If you do not select this setting, the virtual disk starts small and grows as you add data to it.
   Store virtual disk as a single file	Select this option if the virtual disk is stored on a file system that does not have a file size limitation.
   Split virtual disk into multiple files	Select this option if the virtual disk is stored on a file system that has a file size limitation. When you split a virtual disk less than 950 GB, a series of 2 GB virtual disk files are created. When you split a virtual disk greater than 950 GB, two virtual disk files are created. The maximum size of the first virtual disk file is 1.9 TB and the second virtual disk file stores the rest of the data.

9. Accept the default filename and location, or browse to and select a different location.
10. Click Finish to add the new virtual hard disk.

    The wizard creates the new virtual hard disk. The disk appears to the guest operating system as a new, blank hard disk.

11. Click OK to save your changes.
12. Use the guest operating system tools (such as the Windows Management tool or the fdisk command in Linux) to partition and format the new drive.