How to copy vmdk file from esx

I hope this one helps. To continue this discussion, please ask a new question. Get answers from your peers along with millions of IT pros who visit Spiceworks. Popular Topics in VMware. Which of the following retains the information it's storing when the system power is turned off?

Submit ». Pure Capsaicin. Gary D Williams This person is a verified professional. Unzip the two files from the archive. By default, the files are extracted to the Win-test2. For performing the next step, you should have a healthy VM with a functional operating system on your machine with VMware Workstation of Player installed.

The Add Hardware Wizard is open. Select Hard disk as the hardware type. Then, select a type of disk you may leave the recommended value. On the Select a Disk screen, select the Use an existing virtual disk option. Select the vmdk file not -flat. You can browse the file or enter the entire path to the file manually.

In the current example, ESXi 6. VMware Workstation says that the virtual disk copied from the ESXi host is not compatible with this virtual machine:.

The selected virtual disk is incompatible with this Workstation Adding this disk would make this virtual machine incompatible with older VMware products. This error can be fixed by editing the disk descriptor file the lightweight vmdk file in the case of virtual disks of ESXi VMs. In our case, 13 gets changed to Open the Disk Management in Windows, change your virtual disk status to online, assign a drive letter to a partition and browse the files.

You can mount VMDK files directly to your host operating system in a short period of time. This method requires you to have VMware Workstation installed on a Windows or Linux operating system running on your physical computer.

Similarly to all previous methods considered in this blog post, your operating system must support file systems of virtual disk partitions. If you have snapshots of your virtual machine, the delta virtual disks are created after creating each snapshot. You should have a parent virtual disk and delta disks available if you want to open a virtual disk state the moment after taking one or another snapshot.

In this case, you should mount the appropriate delta virtual disk to your host operating system. Dependencies related to the parent virtual disk will be resolved automatically. If you have snapshots but wish to open a parent virtual disk, please open the parent virtual disk in the read-only mode because making changes on the parent virtual disk can cause problems with damaging snapshots or linked clones created from a parent virtual machine with the parent virtual disk.

The read-only mode prevents you from writing data on a virtual disk after mounting the disk to the host OS. After taking the first snapshot, the Snapshot1. The first example is for Linux and the second example is for Windows. Hit Mount Disk , the pop-up window is opened after that.

Create the directory on your Linux file system for mounting a virtual disk of the VMDK format to that directory. Set permissions for your user the user name is user1 and it is a member of group1 in the current example :. You can see Snapshot1. Each of these two files is located on the separate delta VMDK virtual disk. WinXP-test is the VM name in our example. Mount a virtual disk. You can use the -r key in the command line to mount a disk in read-only mode.

It is recommended that you open the VMDK file in read-only mode to prevent any possible damage of virtual disks that belong to the snapshot chain after writing data. The default drive letter is Z: in this case and the drive is opened in Windows Explorer automatically after mapping if the appropriate checkbox is ticked. Hit OK to proceed. Now the virtual disk is mounted as disk Z: in Windows.

On the screenshot below, you can see the Snapshot1. The Snapshot2. After disconnecting the virtual disk, you can power on a VM that uses this virtual disk. If you are looking for how to open VMDK files without running virtual machines, you can install 7-zip and extract content from virtual disk images. This tool can be used on Linux and Windows machines. Files can be copied on directly connected Esxi. As shown in the screenshot, go to storage , double click the the datastore where you want to copy files, select Datastore browser , next from the wizard upload the file, it takes time based on file size.

Login to the ESXi using root password or with domain account. Once logged in successful, Run command to show valid powershell datastore drives. Next to list the files and folder within directory use below command, Here from GUI you can see how folder path is listed under datastores view and it consist of foldername, datacenter and datastore name.

In the directory listing I can see the files files and folder, One screenshot is from commandline and another is from vsphere web client. Start copying file using below command. List the directory items using below command again.

File should be listed and you can verify the saem from GUI. Drive is mounted and This command list the new mapped drive. Now I can directly list the files and folder from the new mapped drive. And use simmilar drive to copy files to destination mapped drive. Go Back.