(Sorry, Rich, I managed to miss reply-all.)

These VMDK files are difference files from a baseline VMDK file.

I'm not familiar with ESX's storage, but the size indicators on these tell me they aren't raw. For a virtual disk that has 3.2GB of data in its current state, against 3.0GB of data in its baseline, the current state's .vmdk file is 200MB.

--Alex

On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 6:11 AM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones@redhat.com> wrote:

On Sun, Jun 09, 2013 at 05:49:44PM -0400, Alexander Nelson wrote:
> I've used QEMU to read .vmdk snapshots. The VM directory layout in my case
> (Fusion, and I've seen Workstation do the same) created a .vmdk file per
> snapshot, and qemu-img could use that .vmdk file and the base .vmdk to
> convert the disk image to a raw image. IIRC there is a manifest file that
> ties .vmdk files to the snapshot they represent.
>
> So, from my experience, qemu does read disk snapshots in the .vmdk
> format. It might need a little extending to also look for and parse that
> manifest file, to treat a directory with .vmdk's as a snapshot tree.

Are these real VMDK files, or do you mean the "vmdk" files which
are really raw that ESX produces?

TBH I don't know a lot about the VDMK format, except that the
specifications are intimidating.

Rich.

--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones

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