This begins a few posts on the topic of “Tools You Didn’t Know You Needed”. What qualifies as one of these tools? Well… anything that you’ve found really useful for managing VMs or your virtual infrastructure, and is something every administrator should have in their tool box.
Starting things off, is Gparted. Gparted is an open source partition resizing tool. Remember the time when Partition Magic was the only game in town for resizing partitions? Being the only tool, it had the price tag to go along with it. Now there is Gparted, which is free open source to do this. Where Gparted comes in wicked handy, is for resizing those partitions that are not otherwise easy to do. Like the OS drive of a Windows 2003 VM, or most Linux partitions that are not LVM.
The interface is fairly straight forward:
![gparted_1_small[1]](http://professionalvmware.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/gparted_1_small1.jpg "gparted_1_small[1]")
Gparted can be downloaded from here.
What tools have you found essential, that are not otherwise provided with vSphere/ESX? Let me know in the comments.
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