Forum Discussion
VMware Workstation File Size Error
Greetings,
When trying to power up the Big-IP LTM VE with VMware Workstation 7.1 on WinXP SP3, I get the following error:
"VMware Workstation cannot open one of the virtual disks needed by this VM because it is larger than the maximum file size supported by the host file system. Some remote file systems do not support files larger than 2 GB, even though the file system on the server might.
Cannot open the disk '..\Big-IP LTM VE\BIGIP-10.1.0.3341.1084\BIGIP-20.1.0.3341.1084.vmdk' or one of the snapshot disks it depends on.
Reason: The file is too large."
I followed the LTM VE installation video provided here by Randy Reichenbach, and have double checked my minimum requirements and VMware Workstation settings, and still get hung up with this error on power up.
Any help, pointers, advice, or random musings on the subject would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
j1devc2d
qe_102628Nimbostratus
Sounds like your Windows XP box is running on a FAT32 filesystem. FAT32 has a 2GB filesize limitation. You'll have to use another Virtualization host platform for your trial - perhaps one running NTFS? VMware ESXi is another good choice. You might be able to reformat a partition or add in a disk to your existing box to get an NTFS filesystem up and running that's capable of hosting files larger than 2GB in size.
(this isn't an LTM-VE issue per se - you'd get this error with any VM or file over 2GB in size on Windows XP with FAT32 disks - VMware workstation is calling the error out correctly)
it could also be that your host file system is just too full...- Thanks for the quick reply, qe.
I checked and the file system shows as NTFS. Also, the drive has 30GB capacity and 17GB free. So, I seem to be good there.
However, and this may throw some wrenches, I am actually running WinXP SP3 as a VM using Parallels on a Mac. Then, inside of my Windows VM, I am running VMware Workstation to get the Big-IP LTM VE going. I've also verified the specifics of the Windows VM, and it should meet the minimum requirements without issue.
Any other thoughts would be appreciated... - qe_102628try chucking this into the .vmx and booting it - you might be encountering an overhead check issue that VMware Workstation performs on boot of a VM:
diskLib.sparseMaxFileSizeCheck= "false"
If you want it easier, VMware Fusion works a lot better - you won't have to jump through so many layers of virtualization.
e.g. Mac OS -> VMware Fusion -> BIG-IP
versus Mac OS -> Parallels -> XP -> VMware -> BIG-IP.
BIG-IP VE is not supported on Fusion but a fair number of people have had success with it. - Thanks again, qe.
Adding the false file check parameter to the .vmx actually caused the Windows VM to crash on every power up attempt. I looked at the VM logs and really didn't find a smoking gun on that one. So, I downloaded VMware Fusion 3, as you suggested. That one worked without issues at all, and I now have my Big-IP LTM VE up and running!
Thanks so much for your help!
j1devc2d