Let’s have a look at some of the benefits this feature offers and requirements before you dive in and use it.

Benefits

The re-sizing feature allows expanding or shrinking a Virtual Machine hard disk while the Virtual Machine is running. Storage administrators can avoid downtime to perform virtual hard disk maintenance tasks and there is no impact to end users. Users can still access Virtual Machine and its volumes. This feature reduces the maintenance costs associated with downtime of critical Virtual Machines.

There is also a Resize-VirtualDisk PowerShell cmdlet available which can be used to script the re size operation on multiple virtual hard disks quickly. There is no need to use or enable any component to use this feature. This functionality is available out of the box using “Edit Virtual Hard Disk” wizard.

Requirements

Since it is a feature of Hyper-V running on Windows Server 2012 R2, make sure to perform this task on a Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Server. You must also be using a VHDX format and this must be connected to a SCSI controller before you can expand or shrink a Virtual Hard Disk. However, Disk type can be fixed, differencing or dynamic.