Specifications

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VMware GSX Server Virtual Machine Guide
You have two options for an independent disk. You can make the disk
Persistent, which means that changes are immediately and permanently written
to the disk. Or you can make the disk Nonpersistent, which means that changes
to the disk are discarded when you power off or reset the virtual machine.
6. Decide if you want to preallocate the virtual disk space. Allocating all the space
at the time you create the virtual disk gives somewhat better performance and
ensures you do not run out of disk space on the host, but it requires as much disk
space as the size you specify for the virtual disk. You cannot shrink a preallocated
disk. To preallocate the virtual disk, check the Allocate all disk space now box.
A preallocated virtual disk is needed for clustering virtual machines. For more
information about clustering, see High-Availability Configurations with VMware
GSX Server in the VMware GSX Server Administration Guide.
If you do not preallocate the disk, the virtual disk’s files start small and grow as
needed.
You may also specify whether you want the virtual disk created as one large file
or split into a set of 2GB files. You should split the virtual disk it is stored on a
FAT32 file system or a file system that cannot support files larger than 2GB, such
as FAT16. To do this, check Split into 2GB files.
If you later decide you want to enlarge a virtual disk, change the virtual disk from
preallocated to growable (or vice versa), or split a virtual disk that was created in
a single file (or vice versa), you can use the VMware Virtual Disk Manager to
expand or convert the virtual disk. For more information, see Using VMware
Virtual Disk Manager on page 191.
7. Continue with step 5 under Creating a New Virtual Machine from the VMware
Management Interface on page 50.