On the right side of the screenshot, you can set eyes on the data of the virtual disk descriptor that is embedded into a single vmdk file of the VMware Workstation format. On the left side of the screenshot below, you can see a virtual disk descriptor of the ESXi format (a vmdk file that can be opened with any text editor). A virtual disk descriptor defines the structure of the virtual disk, virtual disk geometry, virtual hardware version, and IDs.Ī virtual disk descriptor is represented as plain text. As for virtual disks of the VMware Workstation format, a virtual disk is represented as a single diskname.vmdk file (monolithic sparse) which is an extent data file that contains an embedded virtual disk descriptor. The pattern of a virtual disk descriptor name is diskname.vmdk and the pattern of a virtual disk extent name that contains all raw data is diskname-flat.vmdk, accordingly. However, virtual machines residing on ESXi servers use a slightly different format of vmdk virtual disks – a virtual disk descriptor and virtual disk extent that contains raw data of the virtual disk are two separate files on the ESXi datastore.

vmdk extension of files and is used by VMware and VirtualBox virtual machines.

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