The possible procedures for opening VMDK files, or backups of ESXi virtual machines created by Iperius, are the following: See also: Backup of virtual machine on VMware ESXi, ESXi Free and vCenter with Iperius Backup The single-file restore procedure can be done starting from a specific incremental, differential or full backup, made on a specific date. Iperius can perform incremental and differential backups of ESXi (and ESXi Free) virtual machines using the CBT / VDDK methodology, and can therefore create different recovery points for a virtual machine.

We therefore have a free software to extract the content of a VMDK file.Ĭlearly, Iperius is also a software for backing up VMware ESXi virtual machines, and therefore the procedure for restoring individual files from VMDK virtual disks is part of this functionality. The functionality is also available in the free version of Iperius. This operation, as well as with VMware Workstation Player, can be done with different applications (just because the VMDK is an open format), such as Winzip, 7zip, PowerISO, etc …, however, one of the most simple and quick ways to extract files from a VMDK virtual disk is to use Iperius Backup. So there are programs that allow you to open or mount VMDK files, explore their contents (like a common zip archive) and extract individual files or folders.

So what is a VMDK file? We can consider it, when detached from a running virtual machine, as a sort of archive containing other files.

VMDK files, those related to virtual machines on VMware Workstation Player and Virtualbox, which are single VMDK files, and those related to virtual machines on VMware ESXi servers, which instead are composed of two separate files: a descriptor of the virtual disk and the extension of the virtual disk containing the data (which has the suffix -flat in the name). vmdk files are virtual disks, which contain all the information of a VMware virtual machine. The VMDK is an open file format, created by VMware and mainly used for cloud computing and virtualization services.

Iperius backup for open files