Can you change from one file per virtual disk to many?

[wsirota]

Hi,

I'm using both Fusion on the Mac and VMWare Workstation on Windows, and I'm having some external drive issues. Because there is great convenience and reliabiity value to being able to switch the disks with the virtual machines between different computers, I guess I am stuck with FAT as a greatest-common-denominator file format.

Except that I have these virtual machines on my Mac which have files that are larger than 2GB, so I can't copy them to a FAT drive. Whoops!

Is there any way for me to convert or clone these VMs to use a 2GB file limit? If there's something obvious that I'm missing, I apologize.

Warren

[oreeh]

You can convert the disks using vmware-vdiskmanager

Example:

"vmware-vdiskmanager -r source.vmdk -t 1 dest.vmdk" would convert source.vmdk to a twoGbMaxExtentSparse (non-preallocated, split into 2GB chunks) disk named dest.vmdk

"vmware-vdiskmanager -r source.vmdk -t 3 dest.vmdk" would convert source.vmdk to a twoGbMaxExtentFlat (preallocated, split into 2GB chunks) disk named dest.vmdk

[admin]

vmware-vdiskmanager can do this, you could also use my GUI wrapper.

Reminders:

• If you have snapshots, be sure to point at the one you're using to make sure you get all the data, though the new disk won't have any snapshot state.

• Remember that the virtual machine must be off while you do this process.

• Check that it works before deleting the original file.

[wsirota]

Well, this worked fine for the VMs that I'd created on a PC (and thank you for that), but the VMs I created with Fusion, the ones with a single file with a .vmwarevm extension - these don't appear to be recognized by the vdiskmanager. Is there any way to split these?

Warren

[admin]

A .vmwarevm file is actually a special folder; you can get inside it by ctrl-clicking it in the Finder and selecting Show Package Contents, or via the terminal. Inside the .vmwarevm bundle are all the normal files: .vmx, .vmdk, etc. See .

[MandarMS]

if you are using Mac Terminal for the same you can use the following command

vmware-vdiskmanager -r /Users/vmware/Documents/Virtual\ Machines.localized/Windows\ XP\ Professional.vmwarevm/Windows\ XP\ Professional.vmdk –t 3 “Destination path of .vmdk”