I uploaded two 15GB .WIM images onto my ESXi 6.0.0 datastore. I have a VM that I would like to image using those .WIM files from within a WinPE environment but can't access the files from within the VM (which does seem logical -- it would be a a security risk to allow access to the root drive from a VM). In any case, it's what I want to do. So I'm looking for workarounds.
I found an open source VMFS driver but it uses Java and WinPE doesn't have Java (https://code.google.com/p/vmfs/).
I thought of maybe mounting the .WIM files as a "ISO" (which doesn't quite work). vSphere will mount the file just fine, but if you try to navigate to the CD drive it complains that there is no filesystem (which is correct). I thought of maybe using DD to try a raw copy from the "mounted" WIM? It just seems like there should be a better way (and I'm not sure if DD will work in this case).
I want to try to avoid having to upload a 30GB ISO image of the two WIMs because it will take a day or two.