I have a big file (220G) I would like to move from a virtual machine to its host.
The file is actually another virtual machine’s disk file.
for other smaller files, I would have done that with a simple scp command moving them accros the network, but this is very slow (around 7 MB/s)
It is even more frustrating when you think about the fact the file is just moving on the same hard drive trough the network, that’s just so inefficient.
How can I copy (or simply move) this single file out of this virtual server to the physical server? Using VMware vsphere (free edition)?
Answer
I don’t think you can.
This would be a rather serious security risk if you could just copy files from the VM into the host.
What’s possible is mounting the VMDK on the ESX host, and then copy the files out from there.
You might want to have a look at the VDDK (Virtual Disk Development Kit), as I think this is able to “mount” VMDK’s.
There are also possibilities to mount the VMDK’s on other hosts, but this would transfer the data over the network as well 🙂 e.g. : http://www.diskinternals.com/vmfs-recovery/mounting-vmdk.shtml
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Vincent Duprez , Answer Author : MichelZ
