How to expand the OS drive of a virtual machine

  • 4 minutes to read

When you create a new virtual machine (VM) in a Resource Group by deploying an image from Azure Marketplace, the default OS drive is often 127 GB (some images have smaller OS disk sizes by default). Even though it’s possible to add data disks to the VM (how many depending upon the SKU you’ve chosen) and moreover it’s recommended to install applications and CPU intensive workloads on these addendum disks, oftentimes customers need to expand the OS drive to support certain scenarios such as following:

  • Support legacy applications that install components on OS drive.
  • Migrate a physical PC or virtual machine from on-premises with a larger OS drive.

Important

Resizing the OS Disk of an Azure Virtual Machine requires the virtual machine to be deallocated.

After expanding the disks, you need to expand the volume within the OS to take advantage of the larger disk.

Resize a managed disk

Open your Powershell ISE or Powershell window in administrative mode and follow the steps below:

  1. Sign in to your Microsoft Azure account in resource management mode and select your subscription as follows:

    Connect-AzAccount
Select-AzSubscription –SubscriptionName 'my-subscription-name'

  2. Set your resource group name and VM name as follows:

    $rgName = 'my-resource-group-name'
$vmName = 'my-vm-name'

  3. Obtain a reference to your VM as follows:

    $vm = Get-AzVM -ResourceGroupName $rgName -Name $vmName

  4. Stop the VM before resizing the disk as follows:

    Stop-AzVM -ResourceGroupName $rgName -Name $vmName

  5. Obtain a reference to the managed OS disk. Set the size of the managed OS disk to the desired value and update the Disk as follows:

    $disk= Get-AzDisk -ResourceGroupName $rgName -DiskName $vm.StorageProfile.OsDisk.Name
$disk.DiskSizeGB = 1023
Update-AzDisk -ResourceGroupName $rgName -Disk $disk -DiskName $disk.Name

    Warning

    The new size should be greater than the existing disk size. The maximum allowed is 2048 GB for OS disks. (It is possible to expand the VHD blob beyond that size, but the OS will only be able to work with the first 2048 GB of space.)

  6. Updating the VM may take a few seconds. Once the command finishes executing, restart the VM as follows:

    Start-AzVM -ResourceGroupName $rgName -Name $vmName

And that’s it! Now RDP into the VM, open Computer Management (or Disk Management) and expand the drive using the newly allocated space.

Resize an unmanaged disk

Open your Powershell ISE or Powershell window in administrative mode and follow the steps below:

  1. Sign in to your Microsoft Azure account in resource management mode and select your subscription as follows:

    Connect-AzAccount
Select-AzSubscription –SubscriptionName 'my-subscription-name'

  2. Set your resource group name and VM name as follows:

    $rgName = 'my-resource-group-name'
$vmName = 'my-vm-name'

  3. Obtain a reference to your VM as follows:

    $vm = Get-AzVM -ResourceGroupName $rgName -Name $vmName

  4. Stop the VM before resizing the disk as follows:

    Stop-AzVM -ResourceGroupName $rgName -Name $vmName

  5. Set the size of the unmanaged OS disk to the desired value and update the VM as follows:

    $vm.StorageProfile.OSDisk.DiskSizeGB = 1023
Update-AzVM -ResourceGroupName $rgName -VM $vm

    Warning

    The new size should be greater than the existing disk size. The maximum allowed is 2048 GB for OS disks. (It is possible to expand the VHD blob beyond that size, but the OS will only be able to work with the first 2048 GB of space.)

  6. Updating the VM may take a few seconds. Once the command finishes executing, restart the VM as follows:

    Start-AzVM -ResourceGroupName $rgName -Name $vmName

Scripts for OS disk

Below is the complete script for your reference for both managed and unmanaged disks:

Managed disks

Connect-AzAccount
Select-AzSubscription -SubscriptionName 'my-subscription-name'
$rgName = 'my-resource-group-name'
$vmName = 'my-vm-name'
$vm = Get-AzVM -ResourceGroupName $rgName -Name $vmName
Stop-AzVM -ResourceGroupName $rgName -Name $vmName
$disk= Get-AzDisk -ResourceGroupName $rgName -DiskName $vm.StorageProfile.OsDisk.Name
$disk.DiskSizeGB = 1023
Update-AzDisk -ResourceGroupName $rgName -Disk $disk -DiskName $disk.Name
Start-AzVM -ResourceGroupName $rgName -Name $vmName

Unmanaged disks

Connect-AzAccount
Select-AzSubscription -SubscriptionName 'my-subscription-name'
$rgName = 'my-resource-group-name'
$vmName = 'my-vm-name'
$vm = Get-AzVM -ResourceGroupName $rgName -Name $vmName
Stop-AzVM -ResourceGroupName $rgName -Name $vmName
$vm.StorageProfile.OSDisk.DiskSizeGB = 1023
Update-AzVM -ResourceGroupName $rgName -VM $vm
Start-AzVM -ResourceGroupName $rgName -Name $vmName

Resizing data disks

This article is focused primarily on expanding the OS disk of the VM, but the script can also be used for expanding the data disks attached to the VM. If only expanding a data disk, the VM does not have to be deallocated. For example, to expand the first data disk attached to the VM, replace the OSDisk object of StorageProfile with DataDisks array and use a numeric index to obtain a reference to first attached data disk, as shown below:

Managed disk

$disk= Get-AzDisk -ResourceGroupName $rgName -DiskName $vm.StorageProfile.DataDisks[0].Name
$disk.DiskSizeGB = 1023

Unmanaged disk

$vm.StorageProfile.DataDisks[0].DiskSizeGB = 1023

Similarly you may reference other data disks attached to the VM, either by using an index as shown above or the Name property of the disk:

Managed disk

(Get-AzDisk -ResourceGroupName $rgName -DiskName ($vm.StorageProfile.DataDisks | Where ({$_.Name -eq 'my-second-data-disk'})).Name).DiskSizeGB = 1023

Unmanaged disk

($vm.StorageProfile.DataDisks | Where ({$_.Name -eq 'my-second-data-disk'}).DiskSizeGB = 1023

Expand the volume within the OS

Once you have expanded the disk for the VM, you need to go into the OS and expand the volume to encompass the new space. There are several methods for expanding a partition. This section covers connecting the VM using an RDP connection to expand the partition using DiskPart.

  1. Open an RDP connection to your VM.

  2. Open a command prompt and type diskpart.

  3. At the DISKPART prompt, type list volume. Make note of the volume you want to extend.

  4. At the DISKPART prompt, type select volume <volumenumber>. This selects the volume volumenumber that you want to extend into contiguous, empty space on the same disk.

  5. At the DISKPART prompt, type extend [size=<size>]. This extends the selected volume by size in megabytes (MB).

Next steps

You can also attach disks using the Azure portal.