Specifications

CHAPTER 6 Using Disks in a Virtual Machine
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• Persistent — changes are immediately and permanently written to the disk. All
changes to an independent disk in persistent mode remain, even when you
revert to the snapshot.
• Nonpersistent — changes to the disk are discarded when you power off or
revert to the snapshot. Choose this option if you want to run a virtual machine
where the virtual disk is stored on a DVD-ROM or CD-ROM, or if you want to lose
any changes made to the virtual disk since the snapshot was taken when you
revert to the snapshot.
Additional Information about Disk, Redo-Log, Snapshot and
Lock Files
This section provides more information about various virtual machine files.
Disk Files
The virtual machine settings editor (VM > Settings) allows you to choose the disk files
for a virtual machine.
You may want to choose a file other than the one created by the New Virtual Machine
Wizard if you are using a virtual disk that you created in a different location or if you are
moving the automatically created disk files to a new location.
The disk files for a virtual disk store the information that you write to a virtual
machine’s hard disk — the operating system, the program files and the data files. The
virtual disk files have a .vmdk extension.
A virtual disk is made up of one or more .vmdk files.
On Windows hosts, each virtual disk is contained in one file by default. You may, as an
option, configure the virtual disk to use a set of files limited to 2GB per file. Use this
option if you plan to move the virtual disk to a file system that does not support files
larger than 2GB.
You must set this option at the time you create the virtual disk.
If you are setting up a new virtual machine, follow the custom path in the New Virtual
Machine Wizard. In the screen that allows you to specify the virtual disk’s capacity,
select Split disk into 2GB files.
If you are adding a virtual disk to an existing virtual machine, follow the steps in the
Add Hardware Wizard. In the screen that allows you to specify the virtual disk’s
capacity, select Split disk into 2GB files.
When a disk is split into multiple files, larger virtual disks have more .vmdk files.