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

{{< tabpane text=true >}} {{% tab header="YAML" %}} 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

{{% /tab %}} {{% tab header="CLI" %}} Use limactl edit to attach while the instance is stopped:

limactl edit <instance> --set '.additionalDisks += [{"name":"data"}]'

{{% /tab %}} {{< /tabpane >}}

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.