Why is VMware Workstation 11 creating additional disks when I explicitly created a flat disk and pre-allocated it? Also, why can't VMware tell how much of the disk is actually in use?

[KernelDev]

I have a 150GB physical disk which I set aside for my VMWare Workstation 11 guest (host is Windows 8.1). When I created the guest I preallocated 120GB in a single flat file. On this system I am running Ubuntu. I was running 14.04, but since I needed a later version of Google protobufs and since Ubuntu (and Linux in general) is useless at getting later versions of components I was forced to upgrade to 15.04 (via 14.10). In the process of install 15.04, VMware decided that is needed another disk, which is baffling because when I look at the file system in the Ubuntu only 35GB is use and 78GB is free. This new very very very unnecessary disk grew to 12GB filling up the physical disk. This then resulted in VMware workstation prompting me about this and giving me only two options (Ok or Cancel). Well since the guest is the only thing on the drive, I have nothing else to free.

Since the stupid dialog is modal, I can't do anything to the VM, like delete snapshots etc. so I have to click cancel. This kills the guest in the middle of the Ubuntu 15.04 installation, so now my guest is in a very inconsistent state and I'm going to have to rebuild it (again) from scratch. The sad part is that I have had to do this so many times due to VMware idiosyncrasies that I now have a script that I store in git which does most of this for me. I hope you take notice of this because it is ridiculous that I should need such a thing.

So here are my questions:

1. Why on earth did your product create another disk when there is more than sufficient space already on the disk?

2. Why on earth did it not prompt me for this?

3. Why does VMWare think that 135GB is in use on the Ubuntu system when only 35GB is in use?

4. Can you point me to a decent competitor product that I can use in place of this? I am well and truly annoyed by VMware's management of storage.

This isn't the first time that VMware storage has been a problem for me. expandable disks (even when capped to a specific size) used up almost triple of that space on disk on another system. I blew away the VM multiple times before getting it to behave itself with a single flat disk, but this tells me that I need to pay attention to it.

Can you please figure out how to manage the storage on your VMs because this is ridiculous.

Does anyone know how I can avoid this in the future? Is there some "no don't create another disk because you're bored" setting that will stop this from happening?

[Bernd_Nowak]

Could it be a snapshot file? If it was me before doing such an OS upgrade I would make a snapshot. Just a question

[KernelDev]

No it was not a snapshot file. It was a new vmdk and VMware had actually assigned that primary vmdk as the vmdk for the guest. The usual suffix for my flat disk is -flat, it instead added a -000002 as a suffix for the 12.9GB disk and no longer seemed associated with the 120GB flat disk that I had originally created. I created a single non-expanding pre-allocated disk specifically because VMware grows disks beyond reason.

[louyo]

It sounds to me like you were creating a new VM and installing it on your 150GB drive. Since you had already allocated 120GB, WS used the remaining 30. When you installed Ubuntu, it should have told you that it was installing in the 30GB partition. Did you look to see that? If that is not what you did, perhaps you should show the steps you took to do the new Ubuntu install. I have not seen the drive usage you have when using thin provisioned drives.

Lou

[continuum]

> it instead added a -000002 as a suffix for the 12.9GB ...

That obviously is a snapshot. If you read latest vmware.log you will see that both vmdks are used.