Disks
This guide explains how to manage Lima disks: standalone raw/qcow2 block devices that persist independently of any instance.
Additional Disks (limactl disk)
Lima disks can be shared across instances and survive instance deletion.
Listing disks
limactl disk list
# or the short alias:
limactl disk ls
Creating a disk
limactl disk create NAME --size SIZE [--format qcow2|raw]
The supported formats are qcow2 (default) and raw.
Example – create a 20 GiB disk named data:
limactl disk create data --size 20GiB
Attaching a disk to an instance
Add the disk name under additionalDisks before starting the instance:
additionalDisks:
- name: data
format: true # format the disk on first use
fsType: ext4 # filesystem to create when format is true
Use limactl edit to attach while the instance is stopped:
limactl edit <instance> --set '.additionalDisks += [{"name":"data"}]'
Resizing an additional disk
limactl disk resize NAME --size NEW-SIZE
Deleting a disk
limactl disk delete NAME [NAME...]
Note: A disk cannot be deleted while attached to a running instance. Stop the instance first or use
--force.
Resizing the VM’s primary disk
Starting with v1.1, Lima supports editing the disk size of an existing instance using the --disk flag with the limactl edit command.
This is the recommended and simplest way to resize your VM disk.
limactl edit <vm-name> --disk <new-size>
Example for 20GB:
limactl edit default --disk 20
Note:
- Increasing disk size is supported, but shrinking disks is not recommended.
- The instance may need to be stopped before editing disk size.