I know how to increase disk size of a Windows VM. Somehow, I cannot get it done with a Mac OS VM. Any thoughts?

I had to clone to a bigger vdisk to get this done. You can use the unRAID GUI to increase the disk but you will just get a bunch of extra unallocated space on the disk. And using Disk utility in to take up the extra space just would now work. It would error out almost every time. 

Just now, david279 said:

I had to clone to a bigger vdisk to get this done. You can use the unRAID GUI to increase the disk but you will just get a bunch of extra unallocated space on the disk. And using Disk utility in to take up the extra space just would now work. It would error out almost every time. 

Thanks for your quick reply and help. What's the easiest way to clone the disk? I've never done so.

I know CCC works for sure in all version of mac os. You can even use disk utility in recovery in everything but big sur...Restore one disk to another does not seem to work in big sur right now. But CCC is the for sure thing. Add your new big vdisk to your VM template, boot up and run CCC...clone to new disk. Just make sure you copy over your EFI partition just incase. I myself keep EFI on a separate vdisk from my hackintosh vdisk. 

3 minutes ago, david279 said:

I know CCC works for sure in all version of mac os. You can even use disk utility in recovery in everything but big sur...Restore one disk to another does not seem to work in big sur right now. But CCC is the for sure thing. Add your new big vdisk to your VM template, boot up and run CCC...clone to new disk. Just make sure you copy over your EFI partition just incase. I myself keep EFI on a separate vdisk from my hackintosh vdisk. 

Thanks for your help.

 

Step 1 - Add a second vdisk (manual / sata / 1000gb / raw / sata)

 

Step 2 - Boot VM and install CCC. Shut down

 

Step 3 - Delete first vdisk

 

That's it? I never thought you could clone on a live disk. EFI is on the same disk for me, so seems no need to copy it over?

Just now, steve1977 said:

Thanks for your help.

 

Step 1 - Add a second vdisk (manual / sata / 1000gb / raw / sata)

 

Step 2 - Boot VM and install CCC. Shut down

 

Step 3 - Delete first vdisk

 

That's it? I never thought you could clone on a live disk. EFI is on the same disk for me, so seems no need to copy it over?

You can clone a live disk using CCC. Even works in Big Sur. I cloned my vdisk to a nvme disk live using CCC...the trial version. 

1 minute ago, david279 said:

You can clone a live disk using CCC. Even works in Big Sur. I cloned my vdisk to a nvme disk live using CCC...the trial version. 

You run Big Sur baremetal on a NVME? Without any vdisk? That's pretty outstanding. How did you make this work?

Just now, steve1977 said:

You run Big Sur baremetal on a NVME? Without any vdisk? That's pretty outstanding. How did you make this work?

I run a Big Sur VM using a passed through nvme drive as my main disk. My EFI sits on a vdisk.

That reads quite cool. Would I need to do a fresh install to get the EFI on a vdisk?

You also do the same for a Windows VM?

 

Did this improve your performance or why did you do this rather than a vdisk?

18 minutes ago, steve1977 said:

That reads quite cool. Would I need to do a fresh install to get the EFI on a vdisk?

You also do the same for a Windows VM?

 

Did this improve your performance or why did you do this rather than a vdisk?

Never tried it with windows but something like clonezilla could work for windows. I had a old nvme drive laying around so i decided to use it that's the only reason i switched to it. The performance is good but i do not do much but watch videos and movies using the VM. vdisk are still very good with performance and way easier to back. Just decided to give it a try. 

2 hours ago, david279 said:

Never tried it with windows but something like clonezilla could work for windows. I had a old nvme drive laying around so i decided to use it that's the only reason i switched to it. The performance is good but i do not do much but watch videos and movies using the VM. vdisk are still very good with performance and way easier to back. Just decided to give it a try. 

Unfortunately, I don't seem to get it working. Issue seems to be that the VM (and Unraid) crashes once I start the cloning process. Issue seems to be that I am accessing the network. I also tried before to copy things from the network to the VM, which also crashed the VM and even Unraid. Seems some network driver issue?

You shouldn't be doing anything with the network if you are cloning the disk. Just clone from vdisk to vdisk.

2 minutes ago, david279 said:

You shouldn't be doing anything with the network if you are cloning the disk. Just clone from vdisk to vdisk.

You clone it from within the VM? If so, how do you access the othe vdisk, which is not inside the VM?

You are doing everything in the VM. Add the bigger vdisk to your xml and then boot the VM. The vdisk will show up as a new disk then clone. I suggest creating a new blank VM with the bigger vdisk then go into that VMs xml and copy the vdisk portion. Copy that into your hackintosh VM xml in the storage/vdisk area. That way you don't mess up the xml guessing paths. 

 

Ah true, that makes sense. That's probably why Unraid crashed. I accessed a vdisk over the network that was already passed through to the VM...

 

The larger vdisk doesn't show up though in CCC. Do I need to format it or do anything else in disk utility?

The disk should show but may need to be formatted in disk utility. Show a screenshot of disk utility...

Edited January 5, 20215 yr by david279

Somehow, I can no longer create the second VM. Maybe need to restart Unraid. To avoid mistakes: vdisk type is sata or virtio? My first vdisk is sata, but checking.

Make it a sata disk. 

Cloning now. I just realized that I can actually add "unraid shares" to the VM. I've never done this after using VMs for many years. Does this allow me to access drives from the array within the VM directly. This should be much faster than mapping them as network disks? is this how it works?

I have never tried that. But adding the vdisk into the VM is the optimal way. 

2 minutes ago, steve1977 said:

This should be much faster than mapping them as network disks?

"should be", but it usually ends up much slower.

I finished cloning the disk successfully. Unfortunately, the cloned disk doesn't start. EFI issue?

 

** edit ** I copied over the EFI folder and it now works. Thanks for all your help!

Edited January 5, 20215 yr by steve1977