We try hard not to lose data, so rather than doing these operations in place (where something could go wrong if the power fails), we make a copy and only replace it when we’re sure it succeeded. Another advantage of split disks is that you don’t need as much space to consolidate snapshots or shrink virtual disks. By splitting virtual disks to be below this limit (typically 4 GB), you can keep a virtual machine on such a filesystem without losing data. So why choose one over the other? Split disks are critical in some cases – for example, some filesystems (such as FAT) can’t deal with files larger than a certain size. Preallocated/split virtual disks have a -f# suffix (where # is a number), while sparse/split virtual disks use a -s# suffix. If you have a sparse/split virtual disk, each slice can be up to 2 GB, depending on how much data falls into that slice. If you have a preallocated/split virtual disk, each slice (except possibly the last) will be 2 GB. There’s a small, plaintext metadata file, and a number of slice files. In contrast, a split virtual disk is, well, split into multiple files.

The previous posts about sparse and preallocated virtual disks showed monolithic disks. Note: You might still have multiple vmdk files in a virtual machine (either because you have multiple disks or because you have snapshots). In a monolithic virtual disk, everything in a virtual disk is kept in one file – this includes metadata about the virtual disk (e.g.

preallocated affects how the data inside the guest is stored in the. You can have a sparse/split virtual disk (the default in Fusion 2.0), a sparse/monolithic virtual disk (the default in Fusion 1.x), a preallocated/split virtual disk, or a preallocated/monolithic virtual disk. In addition to the sparse and preallocated virtual disks, there’s another, orthogonal set of options: split and monolithic.

Mount vmdk mac split