Increasing disk size on VMware Fusion running Ubuntu

Oh if this were easy. As explained, this is at first easy, just increase the virtual disk space. In fact with today’s large machine and the fact this is all virtual, literally going from 20GB default to 200GB seems a no brainer for most developers:

Expand from VMware Fusion the Disk to some big number like 200GB
Download the LiveCD ISO for gparted.
Choose the LiveCD from VMware Fusion
Connect to this CD/DVD, you should see the file system on the LiveCD open up
From VMware Fusion Settings, choose startup disk options and boot from the virtual CD
This will put you into the LiveCD

This will allow you to hack away at your virtual boot drive with your virtual CD. Wow, lots of virtual here. The main issue is that the swap space needs to move to the end of the new area. So it is a four step thing:

Select the extended space (which contains the linux-swap area) and right click, drag the extended all the way to the right to take over the unallocated space.

Select the linux-swap space and right click to resize/move and move it all the way to the left

Now take the extended space and move it all the way to the right so it is just the linux-swap space

select /dev/sda the ext4 space and resize and move it to take over all the unallocated space.

Now you can reset the startup disk option and boot to Ubuntu you should be good to go!