I have six partitions totaling 4TB (2 x 2TB disks) attached to a PCI-e Sata card. The card is plugged into an ESXi whitebox I built and the card is directly passed to an Ubuntu 14.04 VM. The Ubuntu VM has a tiny disk, since it doesn't need much space for the OS. I originally allocated 16GB to the VM on my datastore, then shrank it to 5GB when I realized 16GB was more than I needed for a one purpose VM. So, Ubuntu thinks it has 16GB, it doesn't really matter that it only has 5GB, and the 4TB of space allocated for my home network is all NTFS partitions on separate disks.

The problem: If I try to copy a lot of data to a partition from Windows 7, Windows thinks there isn't enough room because the Ubuntu VM thinks it is 16GB with 11GB of free space. So, I've had to break my copies into 11GB or less, which gets annoying. This won't really be a problem in general, but I'd really like to know what I could do to avoid this. Windows doesn't seem to see the size of the partitions it's actually writing to.

Let me know if I didn't explain this well, I rewrote it after reading over my original garbled explanation.

There are samba options to change the way space is reported to allow for such Win stupidity.

Also, you should shrink the filesystem on your VM, NOT just truncate the virtual disk.

1 members found this post helpful.

I'll look into the Samba options immediately, thanks for the answer descendant.

I completely agree with resizing the VM disk first, and then the datastore space allocation, but I've held off running fdisk or a livecd in the VM since once the VM realizes it only has 5GB it will let me copy almost nothing at a time. I'll definitely resize the VM disk just to be safe once I've gotten the Samba problem fixed.

Thanks again for the quick response!