How to grow a virtual disk in a VMWare virtual machine

A VMDK file can be grown while no virtual machine is using it. Growing the VMDK only makes the virtual harddrive bigger - filesystem within the VMDK must still be grown with other methods. For instance on Windows, Diskpart Download Here and on Linux GParted Download Here

On ESX:
vmkfstools -X <newsize>Gb filename.vmdk. On ESX 3.5, you can also edit the VM settings and edit the harddrive when the VM is not running.

Note that on ESX the filename.vmdk file is just a  file containing metainformation and "filename-flat.vmdk" is the actual data file. However, vmkfstools operations are used on the metafile

On VMware Server Workstation and VMware Fusion:
vmware-vdiskmanager -x <newsize>Gb filename.vmdk