How to download files from virtual machine

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Browse All Community Hubs. Personalize Community Now. Top Tags View All. SBX - Heading. SBX - Finance Heading. Said Nikjou. The VHD is divided into multiple file parts that you need to download. For example, the asset files that start with "VHD - There are sixteen different files you needed to install version Download all files parts associated with the desired VHD to a local folder.

You will need at least 45 GB of disk free space. After the download is complete, run the executable file that you downloaded, accept the software license agreement, and choose a file path to extract the VHD to.

This creates a local VHD file that you can use to run a local virtual machine. In the opened window, select the destination. You can copy the VMDK file to some location on the same datastore or to another datastore. Both vmdk and - flat. A virtual disk can be attached to this healthy VM while the VM is running. Select the copy of your VMDK file that you have made previously. In the current example, the copy of Win-test2. Power on the healthy VM to which you have attached the virtual disk you are interested in, if the VM has not been powered on yet.

A virtual disk is added on the fly for a running Windows Server VM. By default, the new attached disk is offline. Right click the disk and hit Online. A disk letter should be assigned automatically for partitions on the added disk. If a disk letter has not been assigned for a partition, right click the partition and hit Change Drive Letter and Paths.

This method can be used when there is no free disk space on the ESXi datastore to copy a virtual disk, for example. As you recall, a virtual disk of the ESXi format consists of vmdk and -flat. Be aware that when you download a thin provisioned virtual disk from an ESXi datastore that has the VMFS file system to your computer, you will get a lightweight vmdk file and a -flat.

This is because thin provisioning can be considered as a VMFS file system feature. The size of the thin provisioned virtual disk on the VMFS datastore is about 2GB now see the screenshot above and the size of the same disk downloaded to a workstation machine is about 8GB see the screenshot below.

Unzip the two files from the archive. By default, the files are extracted to the Win-test2. For performing the next step, you should have a healthy VM with a functional operating system on your machine with VMware Workstation of Player installed.

The Add Hardware Wizard is open. Select Hard disk as the hardware type. Then, select a type of disk you may leave the recommended value. On the Select a Disk screen, select the Use an existing virtual disk option.

Select the vmdk file not -flat. You can browse the file or enter the entire path to the file manually. In the current example, ESXi 6. VMware Workstation says that the virtual disk copied from the ESXi host is not compatible with this virtual machine:.

The selected virtual disk is incompatible with this Workstation Adding this disk would make this virtual machine incompatible with older VMware products. This error can be fixed by editing the disk descriptor file the lightweight vmdk file in the case of virtual disks of ESXi VMs. In our case, 13 gets changed to Open the Disk Management in Windows, change your virtual disk status to online, assign a drive letter to a partition and browse the files. You can mount VMDK files directly to your host operating system in a short period of time.

This method requires you to have VMware Workstation installed on a Windows or Linux operating system running on your physical computer. Similarly to all previous methods considered in this blog post, your operating system must support file systems of virtual disk partitions. If you have snapshots of your virtual machine, the delta virtual disks are created after creating each snapshot. You should have a parent virtual disk and delta disks available if you want to open a virtual disk state the moment after taking one or another snapshot.

In this case, you should mount the appropriate delta virtual disk to your host operating system. Dependencies related to the parent virtual disk will be resolved automatically. If you have snapshots but wish to open a parent virtual disk, please open the parent virtual disk in the read-only mode because making changes on the parent virtual disk can cause problems with damaging snapshots or linked clones created from a parent virtual machine with the parent virtual disk.

The read-only mode prevents you from writing data on a virtual disk after mounting the disk to the host OS. After taking the first snapshot, the Snapshot1.

The first example is for Linux and the second example is for Windows.