The .VMDK file extension is used with the Virtual Machine Disk VMDK format specification used with VMware ESX, ESXi or typically with Vmware Vritual machines.
VMDK is an open file format can be compared with the MS Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) disk format and they are not directly compatible. Tools such as the VMDK to VHD Converter exist to help in the conversion process.
Third party tools and programs to edit or convert VMDK files include Sun xVM, QEMU, VirtualBox and SUSE Studio.
The VMDK file is the base for the virtual machine and the virtual disk image stores the information. It helps to determine how the information is generated, stored and saved. You can have more than one VMDK file on the disk, but the number of files stored depends on how much data you have saved on your virtual machine.
When creating a VMDK file we can set the disks as dynamic or fixed. Dynamic disk grows as the information on it is added. A fixed disk is limited as the disk space is allocated during setup to both the guest and primary virtual machine. It doesn’t change as the machine information grows instead you need to add extra disk to the vm to store new data.
A VMDK file sometimes gets corrupted and to recover this VMware Diskmount Utility can be used.
To use the utility, open a command prompt and change directory to
C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit\bin
The Disk Mount command syntax is:
vmware-mount [driveletter:] [path-to-vmdk] [options]
Use driveletter: to specify the drive letter where you want to mount or unmount a virtual disk.
The path-to-vmdk specifies the location of a virtual disk that you want to mount or query.
Given below is the example for making corrupted vmdk file available for Windows machine.
vmware-mount /p –> shows the partitions and volumes within the .vmdk
vmware-mount /v:N R: diskfile.vmdk –> N is partition from previous step.
Once the partition is mounted recover the files from the mounted partition.
Check: How to Monitor VMware ESXi Host Using LibreNMS
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