Running a VM from an exFAT drive

Question

I use a windows 7-x64 box at work, on which i hv my linux VM running on VMware player 3. How can I use the same VM on a mac. Right now I'm running it on an NTFS external HDD which is perfect for windows. However, I need to use it on my mac (Snow Leopard) through VMware Fusion. The VM is almost 60Gig ruling out FAT32 by a long mile. I've heard a lot about exFAT. Any ideas if VMware fusion will run a VM from an exFAT drive?

Answer 1

Fusion by itself doesn't deal with exFAT.  It's up to the host OS (a.k.a.: OSX) to mount the exFAT partition, then Fusion will use that drive just like it would any other drive that your VM files are stored on.
Me personally, I use Tuxera NTFS to mount NTFS partitions.  You can get the free 3G-NTFS to do the same.  I was getting suspicious errors when running large monolithic VMDK files (i.e.: 60GB VMDK) which caused me to switch from 3G-NTFS to Tuxera.  But Tuxera is not free so you may want to try 3G-NTFS first.
However I will explain an alternate method for you: 2GB split VMDKs.
VMware Player, Workstation and Fusion all support VMDK files split into multiple 2GB chunks.  Normally you have to specify this when you create the virtual disk, but it can be converted later.  (Try creating a new test VM in Fusion or Player and messing with the advanced settings.)  Having the VMDK in 2GB chunk will allow you to use a FAT32 partitioned disk, which can then be used with Windows or OSX without any additional software.  Additionally, copying 2GB chunks is more reliable than a single 60GB file.  And if you ever need to recover data from a corrupt VMDK, it's easier working with 2GB files.  (Many tools have trouble opening very large files.)
The only time most people will "need" to use a VMDK (a.k.a.: not split) is if they need the virtual machine to be compatible with a VMware ESX based host.  However, you can use tools such as VMware Converter to copy virtual machines to and from ESX hosts and in the same process, convert the VMDKs to split files.  The source and destination virtual machines can be both Player so you'd use Converter just to "convert" to 2GB split VMDKs.  The biggest requirement for you is that you need enough disk space.  (Converter "copies" the data, so you end up with a clone of the original virtual machine.  Thus you need twice the space.)  After you convert and confirm the converted virtual machine works, then you can delete the original, if desired.  (This copy method is a good thing because if something goes wrong during the conversion, you simply delete the bad copy and start over.  If it didn't copy and something messed up, you'd possibly destroy your original.)
Me personally, I "need" to have my VMDKs monolithic because they're mostly running on ESX hosts.  I occasionally copy out some of the virtual machines for testing so being able to run them without going through Converter is highly desirable in my situation.  I still use Converter for various instances when I create the virtual machine in Fusion first, since ESX doesn't support growable disks, which are useful on my space limited Mac.  But if you never use ESX, then 2GB split VMDKs on a FAT32 drive makes the most sense for compatibility between a Player/Windows host and a Fusion/Mac host.