Been trying to find the ideal way to setup disks/partitions for Linux guests on ESXi. Seems as though Linux is falling behind when it comes easily adding disk space. The end goal is to be able to add disk space to a Linux server without rebooting the server or taking the server offline.

Ideally, I would expect adding disk to a Linux machine should be as easy as adding disk space to a Windows machine. I expand the vmdk file from vSphere > Open disk mangler > find the disk and extend volume. Would have to use command line tools in linux which is no big deal, but I haven't been able to find a solid way to exand filesystems on the fly.

What is everyone else using for disk setups on their linux guests? Has anyone been able to acheive adding storage space to linux without downtime? Can it be done without using lvm?