Avamar: VM restore to a new VM fails with error "vSphere Task failed: 'File vmname.vmdk is larger than the maximum size supported by datastore"

Summary: After initiating a VMware image restore job, it fails after nearly 2 minutes, with the following error message: "vSphere Task failed: 'File vmname.vmdk is larger than the maximum size supported by datastore 'datastore-name' " ...

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Symptoms

  • In restore logs, the following error messages can be observed:
avvcbimage Error <44035>: vSphere Task failed: 'File [datastore-name] vm-name/vm-name.vmdk is larger than the maximum size supported by datastore 'datastore-name''.
avvcbimage Error <44020>: VM '[datastore-name] vm-name/vm-name.vmx' reconfigure task creation encountered a problem
avvcbimage Error <0000>: [IMG2012] VM creation failed during restore.
  • The same error message can be seen on "Recent Tasks" pane on vSphere UI.
  • A new VM is created on vCenter, but is left over after restore failure with no data attached, and 0 B disk sizes

Cause

The target datastore is configured with a maximum size of virtual disk that can be created. It will not allow creation of virtual disks bigger than that limit.

Example: Below datastore is configured with a maximum size of 2 TB for creating virtual disks. That means virtual disks with a size of more than or equal to 2 TB cannot be created. Thus, restore fails because vSphere prevents Avamar from creating a disk of that size or bigger.
datastore
 

Resolution

Restore the VM to another datastore that has a bigger virtual disk size limit.

Affected Products

Avamar Client for VMware

Products

Avamar
Article Properties
Article Number: 000230168
Article Type: Solution
Last Modified: 11 Dec 2025
Version:  2
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