Making a disk with VMWare provider

sglanger · August 8, 2020, 2:09pm

With the Virtual box provider this works well to make and mount a second disk.

file_to_disk = ‘./data.vmdk’
config.vm.provider :virtualbox do | vb |
unless File.exist?(file_to_disk)
vb.customize [‘createhd’, ‘–filename’, file_to_disk, ‘–size’, 70 * 1024]
end
vb.customize [‘storageattach’, :id, ‘–storagectl’, ‘IDE’, ‘–port’, 1, ‘–device’, 0, ‘–type’, ‘hdd’, ‘–medium’, file_to_disk]
end

When I try something similar with VMWare provider I get “The following settings should not exist: customize” So how do I make a disk in VMWare provider??

file_to_disk = ‘./data.vmdk’
config.vm.provider :vmware_desktop do |vb|

unless File.exist?(file_to_disk)
vb.customize ['createhd', '--filename', file_to_disk, '--size', 70 * 1024]
end
vb.customize ['storageattach', :id, '--storagectl', 'IDE', '--port', 1, '--device', 0, '--type', 'hdd', '--medium', file_to_disk]

end

sglanger · August 8, 2020, 2:30pm

What is particularly odd about this issue is that this page
– https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/providers/vmware –

says that " Learn more about the VMware providers on the VMware provider page on the Vagrant website. … This provider is a drop-in replacement for VirtualBox, meaning that every VirtualBox feature that Vagrant supports is fully functional in VMware as well. "

soapy1 · August 14, 2020, 9:09pm

Hey there,
Vagrant currently doesn’t support managing disks with VMWare. However, disk management is an experimental feature which is available for Virtual Box.

This provider is a drop-in replacement for VirtualBox, meaning that every VirtualBox feature that Vagrant supports is fully functional in VMware as well

Sorry, this is a little bit misleading (we have corrected the docs). The customize option for VB is very specific to VirtualBox. It uses the VBoxManage utility to execute VBoxManage commands before bringing up the machine. Since VMware does not use the same utility for managing VMs this option is not available for the provider.

sglanger · August 15, 2020, 1:46pm

It was very misleading. I posted this Saturday Aug 8, the Commit request to delete the text was posted Monday Aug 10 (see attached). This post was finally answered Friday Aug 14 around 1600 CT. So my team wasted an entire workweek trying to solve an issue that was a known dead end Monday, when we should have just done an OVA export from VBox, tried the VMWare import and used the past 4 days to fix the usual import issues. And of course the $ for the VMWare provider was a waste, but this pales compared to the lost time. Next Monday I get to explain all this to a customer expecting an ESX image. Maybe they’ll understand …