Capacity and FreeSpace of guest disks and partitions are not available

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

When checking the capacity and free space of guest disks:

• the Guest.Disk properties from the virtual machine cannot be queried via API, even though the VMware Tools are installed and running.
• the type GuestDiskInfo in the Managed Object Browser has the value set as Unset.

Environment

• VMware ESX 4.1.x
• VMware ESXi 4.0.x Installable
• VMware vCenter Server 4.1.x
• VMware vCenter Server 4.0.x
• VMware ESXi 4.1.x Installable
• VMware ESXi 4.1.x Embedded
• VMware ESX 4.0.x
• VMware ESXi 4.0.x Embedded

Resolution

VMware Tools (which is reading the disk information) supports a many filesystems. Information is gathered only from these filesystem types:

• ext2
• ext3
• ext4
• hfs
• msdos
• ntfs
• pcfs
• reiserfs
• ufs
• vfat
• zfs

Note: If the disks or partitions are managed by a Logical Volume Manager (LVM), the guest disk info is collected even if the filesystem is not on the above list.