In the VM folder, run vmkfstools -c 4294967296 -a lsilogic -d thin temp.Is there a way to download the VMDK so that I get a file. Initially developed by VMware for its proprietary virtual appliance products, VMDK became an open format with. When I try to download it with the datastore browser or Win SCP it tries to take 1,5 TB of space. VMDK (short for 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. In the datastore the VMDK file size is 22 GB and the provisioned size is 1 500 GB. Find the datastore the VMDK was imported into and do an LS -LA to view the file size in bytes I have ESXi virtual machine that need to download to my desktop.Create a VM with the OS and RAM characteristics needed – dont create/attach a disk.But the other files are descriptors that tell VMware how to use the disk – What OS, what controller, disk geometry, etc…Ī little googling and I found my solution at.

Assuming that it was Win 2k3 server with a 25 GB drive, and the SysAdmin verified this from memory, I created a new VM called Temp as a Win2k3 server with 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, and a 25 GB HDD. The FLAT file contains all the disk, so this was the most important file. I took the size of the flat.vmdk file, divided by 1024, and divided by 1024 again to get the size of the VMDK in GB. Normally VMware uses multiple files, a VMX, a VMDK, and a -FLAT.VMDK, but here I was just given the one. I looked at it briefly and noticed that it was a single file named server-flat.vmdk. Someone sent me a file today and told me to import it into VMware.

Download vmdk file from datastore flat