User`s guide

Operations on Virtual Machines and Containers 77
Changing the Disk Type
A virtual disk can be one of the two types:
 plain. A plain virtual hard disk has a fixed size from the moment of its creation.
 expanding. An expanding virtual hard disk is small initially. Its size grows as you add
applications and data to it.
To change the type of a virtual disk in Parallels Server Bare Metal, you can use the pctl set
command. Let us assume that the current type of the hdd0 virtual disk in the MyVM virtual
machine is plain and you want to change it to expanding. In this case, you can execute the
following command:
# pctl set MyVM --device-set hdd0 --type expand
To change the disk type back to plain, run this command:
# pctl set MyVM --device-set hdd0 --type plain
Increasing the Virtual Disk Capacity
If you find that the capacity of your virtual machine's hard disk does not fit your needs anymore,
you can increase it using the prl_disk_tool utility. For example, you can execute the
following command to set the capacity for the MyVM-0.hdd disk to 80 GB:
# prl_disk_tool resize --size 80000 --hdd /vz/MyVM.pvm/MyVM-0.hdd/
Operation progress 100%
This command adds additional disk space as unallocated space. You can use standard means
(e.g. the Disk Management tool in Windows-based virtual machines) to allocate this space by
creating a new partition or expanding an existing on.
At the same time, you can use the --resize_partition option to automatically add
additional space to the last partition on the virtual disk:
# prl_disk_tool resize --size 80000 --hdd /vz/MyVM.pvm/MyVM-0.hdd/ --
resize_partition
Operation progress 100%
When increasing the disk capacity, keep in mind the following:
 You cannot increase the capacity of a virtual disk if the virtual machine using this disk is
running.
 The virtual machine using the virtual disk you want to configure must not have any
snapshots. Otherwise, the operation will fail:
# prl_disk_tool resize --size 68000 --hdd /vz/MyVM.pvm/MyVM-0.hdd/
This disk has one or more snapshots and cannot be resized.
You need to delete snapshots using the pctl tool before resizing the disk.
In this case, you should delete all existing snapshots and run the command again. To learn
how to delete virtual machine snapshots, refer to Deleting a Snapshot (p. 74).
 The capacity
of an expanding virtual disk shown from inside the virtual machine and the
size the virtual disk occupies on the server's physical disk may differ.