Question for VMWare user(s).

[iugrifma]

Gents,
I know I'm not using the "true" Hypervisor ESX server, I'm using VMWareServer & GSX Server, but this question might apply to ESX too.
Do any of use "run" your virtual machines with their storage (virtual disks) on the Synology NAS? and if so how do you get around the 2Gig file limit thats in the Synology CIFS (SMB) configuration? Or have you all got your virtual disks split into 2Gig files ??
I have a VM with a 60Gig disk (in one file) and cant host the virtual disk(s) on my NAS because I get an error saying the files > 2Gig aren't supported by the SMB host.

Any help to solve this greatly appreciated.

Griffo.

[vm.franklin]

Greetings iugrifma

Can you post the image error message that you see? I'm transferring 4, 8, and 16GiB files on my tests over CIFS - no limit prompt was displayed.
Please refer to my signature links on how to post images on this forum.

Thanks.

[iugrifma]

Hi VM Franklin!
Here's the error message I see when I try to start VMs that are stored on the NAS.


Any ideas
Thanks,

Griffo.

[vm.franklin]

Greetings iugrifma

The limit that you are experiencing is because you hit an Internet Explorer browser limit - where it cannot upload greater than 2GiB files. This file size limit applies to Firefox - and I believe it's the same for Safari as well.

Hope this helps.

[iugrifma]

Hi Franklin,
Can you break this down a little for me ? I want to make 100% sure of what your saying.
VMServer is attempting to open a file >2Gig over the network,
are you saying the error comes from the physical host (in this case Windows 7 PC)
as it tries to open the file
OR do you think the error comes from within the Virtual host (in this case a Windows XP VM) as it tries to boot?
Thanks,
Griffo.

[vm.franklin]

Greetings iugrifma

Your VM Console Manager is attempting to open a file greater than 2GiB within Internet Explorer - this is not supported as Internet Explorer cannot read files greater than 2GiB.

An alternative solution for you is to create a shared folder on your local computer containing your image file. Then from VM Console Manager - set it to point to to your Windows Share to use the file (network intensive - could be slow in the long run) or copy the file to the VM Server (HDD intensive in the beginning, but it will be faster after the file copy is done).

Hope this helps.

[iugrifma]

Thanks for the Tip Frankin,
One additional piece of information I came across while testing around this problem. The error ONLY seems to show itself when the VM is Windows based. For example I have 2 VM machines, one window XP, one Linux (RedHat). The Window XP VM has a harddisk footprint of 4Gigs. When opening it I get the error shown. The Linux VM has a footprint of 15Gig and opens (and runs) across the network without the error or any other issues.


I'm not sure what's going on there. BUT I like your idea of setting up a Windows "SHARE" to see if gets round the problem.
Thanks again for the tip.

Regards,
Griffo.

[congo]

or... you could possibly mount your synology storage in your vmware product as NFS (not CIFS) storage - the maximum file size in cifs causes trouble in many ways when dealing with such "large" files...

[Henry64]

I expirence this problem too, also and with a uBuntu 9.10, using vmware server 2.0, vmware server 2.0 only supports CIFS and not NFS (AFAIK) - altough the volume mounts fine, the VMHost are unable to open the vm since since it's larger than 2gb. How could this be an IE related problem since it's the VM SERVER host that opens the VM and not IE?

Also, I have for the time being dropped iSCSI since I after a few days expirenced a total blackout in the iSCSI volume and I never got in contact with it again and lost my VM's... I wonder if the iSCSI implemenation in DS410j is reliable enough to actually use.
At least NFS allows you to access the share/data if mounting fails.

ESXi 4.0 supports NFS mounting.

[matt-c]

Ok, a few things here.

VMware Server can do NFS, you have to mount it in the host first, then define the datastore in the web management site (if you can get it to load).

I have 3 Syno and counting and never had problems with large files and i have some in the 10's of GB range, ensure your volumes are fomatted in EXT3.

Rgds.