Resizing the disk results in an error popup.

[jandubois]

While not officially supported, you can increase the disk size of the virtual machine (while Rancher Desktop is stopped):

❯ /Applications/Rancher\ Desktop.app/Contents/Resources/resources/darwin/lima/bin/qemu-img resize \
  -f raw "$HOME/Library/Application Support/rancher-desktop/lima/0/diffdisk" 500G
Image resized.

But when you start Rancher Desktop afterwards it displays an error dialog about shrinking it back (which is not supported):

You can prevent the dialog by adding the updated disk size to the override.yaml file:

echo "disk: 500GB" >"$HOME/Library/Application Support/rancher-desktop/lima/_config/override.yaml"

But we should just update the disk size in lima.yaml to match the current size instead.

[jandubois]

Marked as "Enhancement" because resizing the VM disk is not officially supported.

lima-vm/lima#3437 changed Lima to no longer ignore disk size on restart, but try to grow the disk to match the new size. Shrinking the disk is not supported.

[neilsh]

Copy-pasting example text of the actual error to help with searchability:

time="2025-09-15T09:35:29-07:00" level=info msg="Resize instance 0's disk from 150GiB to 100GiB"
time="2025-09-15T09:35:29-07:00" level=fatal msg="diffDisk: Shrinking is currently unavailable"