VMDK File Shrinks after Datastore Upload

[fstephane1]

My company has a client that is trying to upload our VMDK file to his datastore. When he uploads the file, the size is reduced from 7.6 GB to 4.4 GB. When we try to boot up the VM, it runs into fatal boot errors and drops into the initramfs prompt (it's an Ubuntu 32-bit system).

We are not very familiar with VMware ourselves but have had several clients import our VMDK file into their VMware system and successfully boot up. It seems very strange that the file shrinks so much during the upload. We have since tested on another VMware system and did not see any file size reduction.

I believe the client is using ESXi 6.0 (I will confirm the version asap). The client's IT guy said they also use Nexenta software. I'm not familiar with that tool but it seems to be some sort of backup/storage solutions so I'm thinking it may be relevant to this issue.

I've seen several posts mentioning a 4GB upload limit for IE, but the resulting file size in our case is bigger than 4 GB and I believe the IT guy was using Chrome. There were no errors when we uploaded (at least none that appeared conspicuously).

Has anyone run into this type of upload issue with the datastore?

[scott28tt]

Moderator: Thread moved to the vSphere area.

What is the process they are following to upload the file? Are you and your client aware that 6.0 is no longer supported?

[Nawals]

Hello,

Have you check with them they only uploading vmdk file for that particular vm or complete vm files along with vmdks. Please check with them. Also, Suggest to upload the vm files directly from host. I mean connect particular host through vsphere client and the try to upload it.

[IRIX201110141 · Accepted solution]

You should provide a OVF/OVA for your customers and not only vmdk. Nexenta is a company name and they provide storage appliance(virtual or pyhs) and i cant see how its replated to your problem

- vSphere 6.0 runs already out of support

- Ask you customer if they have a proxy which also can cut large files

- Use a modern 64bit browser for the upload

- Use SCP/WinSCP instead

Regards,
Joerg

[fstephane1]

So we ended up preparing a new VMDK file as well as an OVF file which seems to have worked for the client's import. The IT guy did it himself so unfortunately I don't have a ton of details.

Our original VM was built in VirtualBox. Our old VMDK file used for VMware installs was prepared using the VMware ovftool command line tool. This was a pretty hacky process and the only way we could get it working in the past was to extract the resulting VMDK file and pass that along to clients.

For the new files, we simply opened our VBox OVA file in VMware Workstation Pro, and ran the "Export to OVF" process, which produces a VMDK and OVF file. The OVF file is auto-generated and doesn't require any of the manual fixes that were involved in our ovftool process. I've seen evidence online of other people having more success with the Workstation method over the ovftool command line method.

Unfortunately this doesn't really answer any questions about the reduced file size in the datastore, but I'm hoping this may help people who run into similar import issues. Thanks for pointing us in the right direction!