Hello all,
I tried doing a search for this but I might've not searched with the right terms so I couldn't find anything. It would be great if someone could answer my question =].
So I currently have a VM folder that is roughly 30gb in size on the ESX server. Using the OVF tool with compression set at its highest, I was able to compress it to 4gb. However when uncompressing it, it turns out to be about 9gb. I was expecting the ovf-to-vmx file to be 30gb when uncompressing it. Why is it only 9gb? The files that I see missing when uncompressing are the *-flat.vmdx files. Aren't these needed as they are the raw disk files? Does the ESX server VMs have extra files thats unnecessary for the OVF format?
Thank you!
Welcome to the Community,
*-flat.vmdx
is this only a typo or do you maybe have unused/renamed files in the original VM's folder? The virtual disks have a vmdk extension.
Maybe it would help if you could post a list of files with names and sizes of the original datastore and of the target after importing the OVF.
André
Sorry you were right the files I meant to mention end with "-flat.vmdk".
Here are the list of files and sizes.
Before Compression
vm01.nvram 9kb
vm01.vmdk 1kb
vm01.vmsd 0kb
vm01.vmx 3kb
vm01.vmxf 1kb
vm01_1.vmdk 1kb
vm01_1-flat.vmdk ~ 10gb
vm01-flat.vmdk ~ 21gb
Compressed with OVF
VM01.mf 1kb
VM01.ovf 5kb
VM01-disk1.vmdk.gz ~ 3gb
VM01-disk2.vmdk.gz ~ 700 mb
Uncompressed
VM01.vmx 1kb
VM01-disk1.vmdk ~ 8GB
VM01-disk2.vmdk ~10GB
Thanks for the help!
To me this looks like you had/have thick provisioned disks on your ESX hosts and imported the OVF to a desktop application (Workstation/Player) which uses non-preallocated/growing disks.
André