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accutechdata
Contributor
Contributor

Virtual disk is full messages with Workstation 6

I have a 150GB SATA hard disk with two virtual machines on it. Each virtual machine has been configured with a pre-allocated 70gb scsi virtual disk file. With the Windows 2003 Server O.S. and some other small applications the virtual disk has 10gb taken with 60gb free. When I copy a 20gb database file from an external hard drive onto my virtual machine I get a "disk is full" error. I thought I had 60gb free space. This doesn't make any sense to me. Has anyone else had this problem? Should I partition my disk and configure my virtual machines to use physical disks instead of virtual disks? Should I have chose not to pre-allocate the disk space?

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RDPetruska
Leadership
Leadership

Have you ever taken a snapshot of this machine? If so, then your preallocated disk is no longer being written to - a child disk is.

accutechdata
Contributor
Contributor

yes i have done a snapshot. Should I partition my hard disk and configure my virtual machines to use physical disks instead? Would that alleviate this problem?

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continuum
Immortal
Immortal

No - this will not help you at all.

Only thing that helps is understanding how many disk-space is used by snapshots.

In your case - selecting a preallocated disk and then creating a snapshot wastes about 60Gb of your disks.

Don't use preallocated disks when you plan to use snapshots


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Do you need support with a VMFS recovery problem ? - send a message via skype "sanbarrow"
I do not support Workstation 16 at this time ...

holosevic
Contributor
Contributor

Hello Guys

This also works on a Vm Workstation 7.0 aswell

I have a Ubuntu 9.10 with a VMware 7.0. I'am using vmware to boot my physical partition of WXP.

This last days, i was getting a "Vmware has paused your VM because disk full message...." and vmware pauses my Xp vm . It"s impossible to work because the vm gets paused.

On the vmware.log, i see:

Mar 12 11:38:03.633: vmx| Msg_Question: msg.mainMemPosix.noSpace reply=0

Mar 12 11:38:04.377: vmx| Msg_Question:

Mar 12 11:38:04.377: vmx| http://msg.mainMemPosix.noSpace VMware Workstation has paused this virtual machine because the disk on which the virtual machine is stored is almost full. To continue, free up at least 33.9 MB of disk space.

This issue is caused by the "temp files" generated by the VM when its on. The file are mostely called:

*.vmem and *.vmem.lck. Just like this:

564d39dc-fa96-168d-6a41-addc2dffadc5.vmem 564d39dc-fa96-168d-6a41-addc2dffadc5.vmem.lck

You need to specify the fallowing lines in config file and the vmx file of the virtual machine. SInce i have two location of the config file, i modified all of them....

- Edit file in /home/user/vmware/VirtualMAchine/Virtualmachine.vmx

- Edit file in /etc/vmware/config

- Edit file in /home/user/.vmware/config

For all this files, enter:

mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE"

tmpDirectory = "/dev/shm"

workingDir = "/root/vmware" #I specify here the /root but in your case, you need to specify a partition with sufficient space disk.

After this, /etc/init.D/vmware restart and it will resolve your disk full problems

Cheers

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continuum
Immortal
Immortal

FYI

mainmem.useNamedFile is only used on 32bit Linux and Windows - not on Linux 64.

By the way - why do you reply to such an old post ?




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VMX-parameters- Workstation FAQ -[ MOA-liveCD|http://sanbarrow.com/moa241.html] - VM-Sickbay


________________________________________________
Do you need support with a VMFS recovery problem ? - send a message via skype "sanbarrow"
I do not support Workstation 16 at this time ...

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holosevic
Contributor
Contributor

Hi

Sorry for bringing this old post but, it"s the first post i found on Google talking about the same issue as mine that appeared after an up of VM 6.5 to 7.0

Since the post was not closed, i updated it with "a" solution for the next buddies....

thx

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