Exported vmdk size too small

[mcjan]

I am running esxi 7, and I exported a production guest vm using vsphere web client. This guest vm consists of 2 disks: one disk has a total of 278 GB, and 201 GB free space; the other has a total of 909 GB, with 153 GB of free space. I kick started the export, and after a while stopped monitoring it. By the time I came back to check it up, it had "finished" downloading, with 2 vmdk files: one is 55GB, the other is 290 GB. Is this normal? It just looks unrealistically small.

[swaheed1239]

Hello,

The OVA/OVF is a tar archive of all the VM files. By default it compresses the files including the VMDK. Furthermore, the VMDK size compressed in the OVF/OVA is calculated only based on the used space and not the whole space.

In your case, since the used capacity of your first disk is 77 GB and second disk is 740 GB, these two numbers are again compressed to fit into the OVA/OVF format.

However, if you are still in doubt, you can try to import the OVA/OVF into your environment and check. If found any issues, I suggest you to use ovftool.exe which is a utility specially developed for exporting/importing OVA/OVF.

Below link for your reference to ovftool usage:

https://vdc-download.vmware.com/vmwb-repository/dcr-public/bb505ca7-88b5-4b11-aff4-f59125ab27bc/f3d0...

Thanks!