VMware provides native tools within vSphere and ESXi for seamless volume management, but in cases where you need to access VMFS from non-VMware system

How to Access VMFS Datastores from Linux and ESXi?

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2024-10-24 07:00:05

VMware provides native tools within vSphere and ESXi for seamless volume management, but in cases where you need to access VMFS from non-VMware systems, solutions like “vmfs-tools” on Linux come into play.

Updated by Iris Lee on 2024/10/23

If your ESXi host crashes, but the server's local disks (disks) are still available, you can always copy the virtual machine files (data drives and configuration files) from the VMFS datastore and run the VM on a different server (even on VMware Workstation or Hyper-V). The main problem is that common operating systems (Windows and Linux) do not recognize partitions with the VMFS file system by default, because they do not have VMFS drivers. In this article, we will see how to access virtual machine files on disks with the VMFS file system.

VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) is a high-performance cluster file system that extends the application of virtualization technology beyond a single system. VMFS allows multiple virtual machines to access a consolidated cluster storage pool, significantly increasing resource utilization. It serves as the foundation for virtualization across multiple servers, enabling various services such as VMware vMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler, and VMware High Availability.