How to resize a qcow2 disk

Summary

This Articles explains the steps to resize a .qcow2 disk

Question

How to resize a .qcpw2 virtual disk

Customer Environment

vSZ

Resolution

Virtual SmartZone installation Guide describes the steps involved in setting up a vSZ on Nutanix Hypervisor. However, in some cases we might need to expand the virtual disk's size.

The following steps can be used to expand the qcow2 virtual disk size

Set up a Linux machine (Ubuntu used here) and copy the qcow2 image into the /var/tmp folder.

root@ubuntu-106:/var/tmp# ls -l
-rw-r--r-- 1 fiuser fiuser 3394375680 Mar 27 01:34 vscg-6.1.2.0.441.qcow2
root@ubuntu-106:/var/tmp#

Run "qemu-img resize vscg-6.1.2.0.441.qcow2 +150G" command to resize the disk. If you are seeing the following error, then the utilities have to be upgraded first:

Command 'qemu-img' not found, but can be installed with:
apt install qemu-utils

root@ubuntu-106:/var/tmp# apt-get updateHit:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy InRelease
Get:2 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy-security InRelease [129 kB]
Get:3 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy-updates InRelease [128 kB]
Get:4 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy-backports InRelease [127 kB]

Get:40 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy-backports/multiverse amd64 c-n-f Metadata [116 B]
Fetched 13.3 MB in 7s (2,000 kB/s)

Reading package lists... Done

Install the updates using the below command:

root@ubuntu-106:/var/tmp# apt install qemu-utils

Run "qemu-img resize vscg-6.1.2.0.441.qcow2 +150G" command again to resize the disk

root@ubuntu-106:/var/tmp# qemu-img resize vscg-6.1.2.0.441.qcow2 +150G
WARNING: Image format was not specified for 'vscg-6.1.2.0.441.qcow2' and probing guessed raw.
Automatically detecting the format is dangerous for raw images, write operations on block 0 will be restricted.
Specify the 'raw' format explicitly to remove the restrictions.
Image resized.
root@ubuntu-106:/var/tmp#

Article Number:
000014467

Updated:
December 12, 2025 08:20 AM (4 months ago)

Tags:
Firmware, Installation, SmartCell Gateway

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