Changing Virtual Machine 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.

A new virtual machine is created with an expanding virtual disk. However, you can change the type of the virtual disk using either the prlctl or prl_disk_tool utility. Let us assume that the current type of the hdd0 virtual disk in the MyVM virtual machine is expanding and you want to change it to plain. To do this, you can execute one of the following commands:

# prlctl set MyVM --device-set hdd0 --type plain

or

# prl_disk_tool convert --hdd /var/parallels/MyVM.pvm/harddisk.hdd --plain

The main difference between these two commands is that prlctl requires for its execution the disk name as it is shown by the prlctl list --info command (hdd0) while prl_disk_tool needs the full path to the virtual disk drive (/var/parallels/MyVM/harddisk.hdd).

To change the disk type back to expanding, run one of the following commands:

# prlctl set MyVM --device-set hdd0 --type expand

or

# prl_disk_tool convert --hdd /var/parallels/MyVM.pvm/harddisk.hdd --expanding