Trisha Shetty (Editor)

VMDK

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Filename extension
  
.vmdk

Type of format
  
Disk image file

Developed by
  
VMware

Website
  
developercenter.vmware.com

VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk) is a file format that describes containers for virtual hard disk drives to be used in virtual machines like VMware Workstation or VirtualBox.

Contents

Initially developed by VMware for its virtual appliance products, VMDK is now an open format and is one of the disk formats used in the Open Virtualization Format for virtual appliances.

The maximum VMDK size is generally 2TB for most applications, but in September 2013, VMware vSphere 5.5 introduced 62TB VMDK capacity.

Uses

Products that use the VMDK format as the native file format include:

  • VMware Workstation
  • VMware Player
  • VMware Server
  • VMware Fusion
  • VMware ESXi
  • VMware ESX

    • Third-party products with VMDK support include:

  • Parallels Desktop: Version 10 supports VMDK format
  • Sun xVM: natively supports VMDK format
  • QEMU: natively supports VMDK format and provides the qemu-img utility to convert VMDK images to a number of different formats
  • VirtualBox (part of the Oracle VM suite) also supports VMDK files
  • SUSE Studio: builds virtual appliances using the VMDK format, among others
  • Norton GHOST: Hard drive imaging software
  • ILookIX: Computer forensic examination suite

    • Software libraries with VMDK support include:

  • .NET DiscUtils: Open Source C# library

    • Virtual Disk Provisioning Options

  • thin: Blocks are not allocated or zeroed during initial provisioning. Block allocation and zeroing is performed at first access.
  • zeroedthick: Blocks are allocated during initial provisioning but are not zeroed until first access.
  • eagerzeroedthick: Blocks are allocated and zeroed during initial provisioning.

    • References

    VMDK Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA


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