I’ve done a few posts in the past which discuss the VM Home Namespace object. To recap, the VM Home Namespace is where we store all the virtual machine configuration files, such as the .vmx, .log, digest files, memory snapshots, etc. I also highlighted that the VM Home Namespace is limited to 255GB in size. This led one reader to raise the following observation:
It means that it is not possible to do a snapshot with memory for a VM with 256 GB of RAM.
This is indeed correct. If you attempt to snapshot a VM (with memory) that has a memory configuration that does not fit into the VM Home Namespace (in this case I created a VM with 256 GB of memory), you will hit the following “insufficient disk space on datastore” error:
Are there any plans to decrease VM Home Namespace?
I can’t say too much about futures at this point, but what I can say is that the issue is recognised, and we certainly plan to address it going forward. However, in the meantime, if you have VMs with large memory requirements, and you wish to be able to snapshot those VMs along with the memory, be cognizant of this restriction.