VMware Cloud Community
Neonewbie
Contributor
Contributor

MAXIMUM file size supported ? Error

Hi guys can you help on this one.

I get an error while creating a snapshot of a vm.

ERROR. file unspecified file. is larger than the maximum size supported by datastore. unspecified datastore.

um

what does this mean, and can i change stuff to make it work?

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Troy_Clavell
Immortal
Immortal

you'll need a bigger block size probably.  See if the below article helps explain it.

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1012384

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AndreTheGiant
Immortal
Immortal

About block size see also: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11920

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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depping
Leadership
Leadership

If you are using multiple VMDKs and one of them is located on a different datastore it might be the case that this VMDK is located on a datastore which has been formatted with a different datastore than where your VMX (VM Configuration File) is stored. The latter is also where your snapshot is stored and vSphere assumes that this snapshot can grow just as large as your disk, hence the reason the filesystem needs to support files of that size. One way of avoiding this would be to use similar blocksizes on all VMFS volumes. Unfortunately in order to increase the blocksize the VMFS volume needs to be reformatted, which means you will need to move all VMs off.

Duncan (VCDX)

Available now on Amazon: vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS technical deepdive

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