Copy vmdk file from data store

Pure Capsaicin. Gary D Williams This person is a verified professional. Verify your account to enable IT peers to see that you are a professional. Paul This person is a verified professional. Will keep updating. Paul wrote: "likely to be quicker to do this ESXi console" The temp datastore keeps dropping out when I do it from the console.

What do you mean by this? How is the temp datastore connected? Select Change datastore option then click Next. For each disk to move, click in Storage field the datastore parameter to change then select Browse.

You can change the Disk format during move as well by clicking the current format Same format as source and selecting the new format i. Thick Provision Eager Zeroed. When Storage and Disk format parameters have been set, click Next to continue. Checking the VMDKs location , the files are now stored to datastores previously set. 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. Download the compatible version of 7-zip from the official web site and install the application on your Windows machine.

Use the EXE installer for more convenience. After installing 7-zip on Windows, new 7-zip options are added to the context menu when you right click any file or folder in Windows Explorer see the screenshot. Use these options to open a VMDK file as an archive or extract files right now.

On the screenshot below, the content of the standalone Win-test2-flat. One of the most powerful capabilities of Linux is the ability to perform the highest number of operations in the console even with built-in tools.

These tools will help you to mount VMDK files and access the content stored on virtual disks. Ubuntu Linux is used in the provided examples.