VMDK files can also be referred to as VDIs (Virtual Disk Images). Put simply, VMDK files are an image of a VirtualBox/VMware virtual hard disk containing information about virtual machines. As a plain text file, you can view the descriptor using a Text Editor. What's a virtual disk descriptor? It is plain text that contains the structure of the virtual disk, virtual hardware version, virtual disk geometry, and IDs. In contrast, on VMware Workstations, a virtual disk is represented as a monolithic sparse (diskname.vmdk) with the disk descriptor embedded inside. Notwithstanding, virtual machines hosted on ESXi servers use a different VMDK format that contains the virtual disk descriptor (diskname.vmdk) and raw data (diskname-flat.vmdk) as two separate files on the datastore. vmdk extension the VMDK format is used by VirtualBox and VMware virtual machines. VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk File) is a file format by VMware for storing important information regarding the virtual machines deployed in VMware environments. How Is VMware Data Stored in VMDK Format?
