VM Cloning Error results in VM Crash

[tggasser]

Hi, i was trying to create a clone of a VM, when vCenter gave me to following error:

During the following minutes, the VM crashed! I had to reset the VM and some filesystems were corrupted. Never saw this before and i my opinion, a clone / snapshot operation on vCenter should not be able to crash a VM.

So i the logs, i did find the message:

| vcpu-1| I120: [msg.snapshot.quiesce.vmerr] The guest OS has reported an error during quiescing.

| vcpu-1| I120+ The error code was: 4

| vcpu-1| I120+ The error message was: Quiesce aborted.

But i think the following part is relevant:

| vcpu-0| I120: DISKLIB-VMFS  : "/vmfs/.../.../VMNAME/VMNAME-flat.vmdk" : open successful (29) size = 274877906944, hd = 0. Type 3

| vcpu-0| I120: FILE: File_VMFSSupportsFileSize: Requested file size (274911461376) larger than maximum supported filesystem file size (274877906944)

One question would be, where are these 32 MB coming from which make the file larger than maximum supported? An what can be done to avoid such an crash?

Information:

vCenter Server Version: 5.5.0

ESXi Version: 5.1U3

VMFS Version: 3.46

VM Version: 7

VM OS: Linux 3.8.13-55.1.2.el6uek.x86_64

[hussainbte · Accepted solution]

The maximum file size on a newly created vmfs5 is 2TB-512Bytes.

The maximum file size on a vmfs3 datastore(or a vmfs5 datastore which was upgraded from vmfs3) formated with 1MB block size is 256 GB.

And the file size for your VM is slightly greater than 256 GB and the destination vmfs3 datastore does not support this.

Check the linked KB to get complete understanding.

FYI a clone VM task requires a quiesed snapshot to be taken of the VM.

Creating a snapshot for an ESXi/ESX virtual machine fails with the error: File is larger than maximu...

[virtualg_uk]

Yes the datastore doesn't support this file size.

You might be able to use VMware Converter to clone the VM and resize the partition on the fly?

Also post the vmware.log of the VM for analysis

[tggasser]

Should it be possible to move the VM to a datastore with a 2MB Block size?

[hussainbte]

Yes, provided that kind of free space is available.

[tggasser]

Btw. just to be completely correct here:

For ESXi 5.0 and later hosts using VMFS5 volumes upgraded from VMFS3, the upgraded volumes inherit the VMFS3 block size but the normal VMFS3 block size limits do not apply to the new upgraded VMFS5 volume. Here are the file size limits that apply to the different types of VMFS5 volumes.
For ESXi 5.0 and 5.1 the maximum file size, regardless of block size or VMFS volume upgrade state, is 2TB - 512Bytes.

So for everyone upgrading from VMFS3 to VMFS5, you will always have a max file size of 2TB - 512Bytes