vmdk

Every now and then, a project I'm managing through Vagrant (using either a box I built myself using Packer, or one of the many freely available Vagrant Boxes) needs more than the 8-12 GB that's configured for the disk image by default. Often, you can find ways around increasing the disk image size (like proxying file storage, mounting a shared folder, etc.), but sometimes it's just easier to expand the disk image.

Unfortunately, VBoxManage's modifyvm --resize option doesn't work with .vmdk disk images (the default format used with Vagrant boxes in VirtualBox). Luckily, you can easily clone the image to a .vdi image (which can be resized), then either use that image, or convert it back to a .vmdk image. Either way, you can expand your virtual disk image however large you want (up to the available free space on your physical drive, of course!).

Here's how:

1 - Convert and resize the disk image

First, vagrant halt/shutdown your VM, then in Terminal or on the command line: