artykul8

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:

• http://www.vmware.com/support/ws45/doc/disks_vdiskmanager_run_ws.html
• http://www.vmware.com/support/ws45/doc/disks_vdiskmanager_eg_ws.html

Being an old fan of VMware products (in particular, the fact that I can run VMware VMs on my MacBook, as well as on Wintel desktop), I found myself utterly disappointed this week, when I tried to convert my physical Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 into a virtual instance.

The latest version of VMware Converter kept crashing on me at the start of the conversion process with the error: “Unable to create a VSS snapshot of the source volume(s).”
More disappointingly, even according to press releases VMware vCenter Converter – the latest and greatest version of VMware Converter, officially doesn’t support Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 editions (its latest version at the moment is 4.0.1 and dated 2009-12-08).

After a few failed attempts with VMware, I decided to look at Microsoft offerings. Even though, I couldn’t find an official Microsoft converter product, I found something better – a Sysinternals utility Disk2vhd, which can create a virtual hard disk (VHD) out of running physical image.

The most impressive part that the whole process of converting my running 60G RAID-0 hard drive array took only a couple of minutes, with minimal configuration effort – no heavy installation or complex user-interface interactions. All I had to do is select a check box with the volume(s), which needs to be converted and that’s it. Systinternals delivered an impressive utility once again! Kudos to Microsoft for keeping Sysinternals brand alive and bringing new useful tools.

Links:

• Sysinternals
• Mark Russinovich’s Blog
• Download Disk2vhd
• Run Disk2vhd from Live.Sysinternals.com