The Best Tools You Didn’t Know You Needed – Gparted

by bunchc on September 21, 2009

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]

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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The Tools You Didn't Know You Needed - h0bbel.p0ggel.org
September 22, 2009 at 12:10 pm

{ 5 comments }

vseanclark September 21, 2009 at 8:31 am

Love Gparted.

wint3r September 23, 2009 at 7:30 pm

extpart from dell is good for windows guys:

http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/downl...

kinda like diskpart but it allows you to resize the system volume…

professionalvmware September 23, 2009 at 10:02 pm

Indeed. The benefit of Gparted is that you can both shrink and expand
disks/partitions, and generally works across platforms.

In Win2k8 diskpart can do the system partition as well :-)

-C

wint3r September 24, 2009 at 12:30 am

extpart from dell is good for windows guys:

http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/downl...

kinda like diskpart but it allows you to resize the system volume…

professionalvmware September 24, 2009 at 3:02 am

Indeed. The benefit of Gparted is that you can both shrink and expand
disks/partitions, and generally works across platforms.

In Win2k8 diskpart can do the system partition as well :-)

-C

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