Cormac – forgive me responding to this old post, but I recently ran across this issue and wanted to point out something incorrect (or at least ambiguous) about the description and command you list in Step 3 above. You wrote:
Step 3 – Extend it by 4GB.
~ # vmkfstools -X 4g /vmfs/volumes/cs-ee-symmlun-001A/cormac.vmdk
Grow: 100% done.
Actually the -X option calls for the value of , NOT the amount by which you want to extend the disk, correct? So if your original cormac.vmdk file is 10 GB, your command above will not result in a 14 GB cormac.vmdk, but rather will possibly corrupt your current disk, per KB 994 “You must specify the size you want like to Extend To and not how much you want like to Extend By. Otherwise, the disk shrinks to the new smaller size and data inside the VMDK file might get corrupted. ”
Same information is also unclear in KB 2054563