Where are Guest OS's stored on vSphere disk?

Question

My Vsphere machine failed. I took out 2 hard drives and want to copy over my VM's. When I mount either of them, I see Hypervisor0-3 and a 4.3 GB Filesystem (in Ubuntu).

Anybody have any ideas on where my VM's are?

Answer 1

The files system is VMFS and there is an open source implementation here.

Although, I believe it only allows for read-only access to the VMFS.

There is a nice article on ZDnet on how the writer despise VMFS...it does cover the issue you are facing right now.

The only way you can move data in and out of their VMFS-3 file system is using their provided proprietary tools, in this case the VMWare vCenter Client which is used to remotely administrate an ESX box from a Windows workstation or server, or their Linux command line console which is only available on the full blown VI3/ESX 3.5 or vSphere 4.0 product, not the embedded ESXi version which is becoming increasingly popular with environments using server blades.