I use VMWare Workstation on almost a daily basis. It is without a doubt my favourite piece of software. There is one thing, however, that I find very annoying and that is trying to hit ESC on the startup screen. It is at that point when you need to either hit ESC to get a boot menu or DEL to get into the bios. The VMWare bios splash screen displays for all of about half a second and then gone! So you reboot and try again and again and again...grrrrrr!

Well happily there is a simply solution. Open your .vmx file for the virtual machine you are using and add the following line to the file:

Quite frequently I underestimate how much space my Virtual Machines need, particularly when doing work with MDT 2008 and SMS 2003. This is exactly what happened today and my SMS virtual wasn't happy that it had less than 100Mb space on C:. Fortunately it is really easy to resize a vmdk file. I resized my SMS OS partition using the following command:

vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -x 15Gb D:\Virtuals\LABSRV02\Labsrv02.vmdk

This only gets us part way there though. If you were to start the virtual machine after doing the resize with vmware-vdiskmanager.exe windows would indeed see the new space but the partition would be the same size. I've noticed that a lot of people use GParted but there is an alternative, WinPE.

Attach a WinPE 2 iso to your VM and boot into WinPE. Then run the following:

diskpart.exe
select disk 0
select partition 1
extend

The commands above assume that you are resizing the first partition on the first disk. Using extend will only work if the partition you are trying to extend is the last partition on the disk. You can get more information about diskpart here and more information about using the extend command here.