Physical Host Deployment on VMM 2012 R2

Question

Hi,
We recently deployed two physical servers using VMM 2012 R2's bare metal deployment.
We used a Physical Computer Profile and a sysprep'd image which was stored in VMM's Library.
Once the servers booted up we realized that VMM had created a VHDX file on the server's physical HDD (E:, 500GB size).
This VHDX was mounted as C: and has a total capacity of 40GB!
My question is, how can I expand this VHDX's capacity whilst the server is running?
As this is a physical server I can't really shut it down and expand the drive without physically removing the drive from the server and attaching it to another computer.
When I try to expand the VHDX using powershell's "Resize-VHD" I get the below error:
Command Used: resize-vhd -Path E:\Win2012R2_disk_1.vhdx -SizeBytes 100GB
resize-vhd : Failed to resize the virtual disk.
The system failed to resize 'E:\Win2012R2_disk_1.vhdx': The process cannot access the file because it is being used by
another process. (0x80070020).
Is there any other way I can achieve this?
Thank you
Panicos

Answer 1

You won't be able to expand that VHDX file as is, you'll need to take the VHDX offline to expand it but you won't be able to do that easily.
The size of the VHDX comes from the original sysprep'd image. You'll need to change that. Once you've done that you can then redeploy the host using VMM.
Why do you need to change it? Are the hosts clustered? If so then VMs will be a CSV so there's no need to worry. Whilst 40GB isn't ideal it shouldn't cause an issue.
If they're not clustered is there a RAID controller on the server? If so you might want to change the LUN layout to have say 150GB LUN and a 350GB LUN for VMs.