ESXi 5.1 Thin Prov. VHD - vmdk > 2.036 GB Veeam fails

[KQjem]

Hi guys,

I am having quite a problem in one of my envirements and would be glad to receive some help. Here is the setup:
- 2 ESXi 5.1 vHosts
- 1 Synology-NAS
- Veeam running on another hardwareserver

I have a VM with 3 attached virtual SCSI-Disks: System (300 GB, thin), Data_1 (1.8 TB, thin), Data_2 (200 GB, thin). Now two weeks ago I extended the Data_1-VHD and put it to its maximum of 2 TB (=2048 GB). Since that change Veeam throws me an error, moaning that the maximum Size is reached. I cannot resize the disk, I tried the following guide: http://www.virten.net/2014/11/howto-shr ... disk-vmdk/ - I also tried the VMWare Converter, but I cannot change the size of the disk neither.
I searched through the internet and this forum, I am not the first one with that problem but none of the solutions is what I am looking for ...

So how to handle that issue? Will the problem be solved if I upgrade to ESXi 5.5? Will it be solved if I update Veeam to a newer version? Would it help to transform the disk into Think-Layer Provision?

Thanks in advance
Jeremias

[foggy]

Have you tried to first resize the partition inside guest OS and then the vmdk itself? You can also add a new smaller disk to the virtual machine and copy the data there, detaching and killing the original one after that.

Here's the max file size limits for different vSphere versions, btw.

[KQjem]

Hi foggy,
thanks for your quick reply.
Yes, I shrinked the VHD in Win OS from 2 TB down to 1,7 TB - it did not work
Well yeah, a new VHD would work out very likely. But with 1.5 TB of data it would take quite a while to copy and I would need to reimplement the shares. Which would be ok.
If there is no other way, I go for that solution

Max File Limits: yep, I found that one as well but just after the child fell in the well, as you say in Germany

[foggy]

I believe you can involve VMware support, if required.