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fgobeil
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Issue with Workstation 9, Windows 8 and Storage Spaces

Hi,

I am currently having a strange issue with VMWare Workstation 9 running on Windows 8 when my VMs are hosted on a Storage Spaces setup as a mirror. My Windows VMs are running just fine but all my Linux VMs appear to be getting corrupted after a succesful boot and shutdown cycle. When I try to restart them, they bomb on me on what seems to be disk corruption. I attached a filed RHEL 6 x64 failed boot for reference.

Any ideas what may be causing this? I believe it may be related to Storage Spaces as when take a clean copy of the VM (before it got corrupted) on move it on a drive that is not using Storage Spaces everything works just fine.

What really puzzles me is why would Windows VMs not be affected by Linux VMs are going bad after one boot cycle...

Any help on that one would be greatly appreciated,

Francois.

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Linjo
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Could it be that Workstation is using the Storage Space as swap?

Try to change the setting to "Use only RAM" or something like that in Workstation settings.

// Linjo

Best regards, Linjo Please follow me on twitter: @viewgeek If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

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Linjo
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Could it be that Workstation is using the Storage Space as swap?

Try to change the setting to "Use only RAM" or something like that in Workstation settings.

// Linjo

Best regards, Linjo Please follow me on twitter: @viewgeek If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".
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fgobeil
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I configured VMWare Workstation to only use real RAM (no swap) as shown in the attached screenshot. It seems to have solved my issue.I was able to go through multiple boots using my Linux VMs.

I am wondering if VMWare Workstation should have realized my drive was not suitable for swapping. Then again maybe Workstation is just not aware of Storage Spaces just yet. Any idea what is the good practices when it comes to running VMs off big raid arrays or SANs - which I can only guess face simillar issues?

Thanks a lot!

Francois.

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fgobeil
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Update: my Linux VM eventually got corrupted again. So things improved but still are unusable. I will just move the VM to a good old drive for the time being.

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Linjo
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From what I have read Storage Spaces is far from any of the what the array-vendors and SAN-vendors are doing.

I seems is not meant for anything needing good performance, maybe it will mature in Windows 9 or 10... 🙂

// Linjo

Best regards, Linjo Please follow me on twitter: @viewgeek If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".
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fgobeil
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Some storage technologies offer better performance than others, that I get. What I cannot wrap my mind around is what would VMWare do when running a Linux VM that would get any storage medium, regarldess of its performance to corrupt my virtual drive...

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mgt576
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This is also an issue with vmware player and SmartOS, just trying the standard install corrups the vm badly and almost always panics.

When relocating the vms to standard disks the problems go away.

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grahamg
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I am also experiencing extremely frequent .vmdk disk file issues when running VMWare Workstation 9 VMs from Storage Spaces under Windows 8 Pro (x64).  The attached image is an example.

Storage Spaces is configured with one disk redundancy (3 x 3 TB storage pool with 1 disk redundancy, partitioned into 2 x 2.04 TB storage spaces).  I have no issues when running VMs from non-storage space drives but almost always, after shutting down a VM on a storage space, I will get a .vmdk internal consistency warning on the next boot.  I have configured VMWare Workstation to "Fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM" with no change in behaviour.  The issue persists with version 9.02.

I have not observed file corruption with any other applications that write to the storage spaces, including write intensive applications such as media ripping.

Has anyone else come across this issue?

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