Merging VMware Fusion/Workstation Virtual Split Disk into a Single VMDK

July 12, 2010, 11:36 AM

Every time you create a new virtual machine in VMware Fusion/Workstation, it is always created with a virtual disk (VMDK) split up into 2Gb files. One of the main reasons for that, I guess would be a limitation of FAT-32 file system – maximum file size of 2Gb. However, if you are no longer using FAT file system and would like to convert the default vmdk into one single pre-allocated file, here is what you can do.

In order to convert the existing virtual disk to a single .vmdk file you would need to use a console application ‘VMware Virtual Disk Manager’ located in '/Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion' folder.

Follow these two steps:

– open your Mac terminal console (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal) and navigate to the folder with your VMware disk image

– from that folder run the following command (typing VMware’s diskmanager path with backslash prefixes for space):

/Library/Application\ Support/VMWare\ Fusion/vmware-diskmanager -r originalSplitDisk.vmdk -t 0 targetSingleDisk.vmdk

If you are running VMware Workstation on Windows, you can use the same command with the only difference that vmware-vdiskmanager.exe would be located in a folder where VMware Workstation was installed, e.g.: C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Workstation.

Documentation and other examples for VMware Virtual Disk Manager use: