How do I get Centos VM to re-read its increased Disk size WITHOUT a reboot

You need to issue the rescan command to your SCSI bus.

In VMware the SCSI controller might be found in some unusual place. First find it:

find /sys -iname 'scan'

For me that returned

/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.1/host0/scsi_host/host0/scan
/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.1/host1/scsi_host/host1/scan
/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:10.0/host2/scsi_host/host2/scan

Then just issue the rescan command

echo "- - -" >/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.1/host0/scsi_host/host0/scan
echo "- - -" >/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.1/host0/scsi_host/host1/scan
echo "- - -" >/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:10.0/host0/scsi_host/host2/scan

That should help. :)

I had to deal with a similar problem, on a SLES 11 server. The LVM was built with raw disks, running on VMWare ESXi

# pvcreate /dev/sdd; vgextend ....

After a while I needed to increase LVM size, but I didn't add a supplemental disk and then pvcreate + vgextend as I've done before, but I chose to increase the size of an existing disk (/dev/sdd in this case). After doing the increase in VMWare, I executed a

# rescan-scsi-bus.sh

But pvdisplay was still showing the 'old' disk size. It was necessary to do a

# echo 1 > /sys/block/sdd/device/rescan

for the kernel to learn the new disk size of /dev/sdd

after first doing echo 1 > /sys/block/sda/device/rescan

pvresize /dev/sda did the trick for me