I run VMware Workstation at home because ESX doesn’t have drivers for my SATA controller. After a motherboard failure I had to reconstruct my software RAID, and this morning I tried to recreate a virtual disk I use for saving images of my laptop. Previously it was approximately 140Gb in size; after a rearrange the parition is 237Gb, so I will make the disk 236Gb. This is on an ext4 filesystem. So, off I go:
igibbs@host:/images$ vmware-vdiskmanager -c -t 0 -a ide -s 236GB fs1-images.vmdk
Creating disk '/images/fs1-images.vmdk'
Failed to create disk: The file is too big for the filesystem (0xc00000015).
Err, no it’s not. The maximum file size for ext3 and ext4 is 16TB, for ext4 will eventually be 1,048,576TB (or 1EB). To my knowledge, that’s not block size-dependent like VMFS is. Eventually it turned out that I could create a pre-allocated disk (-t 2) of 236GB but not a sparse disk (-t 0) of 236GB:
igibbs@host:/images$ vmware-vdiskmanager -c -t 2 -a ide -s 236GB fs1-images.vmdk
Creating disk 'fs1-images.vmdk'
Create: 0% done.
Hope this helps someone. I presume it’s caused by Workstation not recognising ext4 properly.
Not directly related but to reach those upper exabyte limits you have to have your partition layout in GPT. MBR has a partition size limit of 2TB.
It’s better to use XFS as the filesystem for vmware workstation. It works really well with big files and the performance is really good.