Restore VMware virtual machine from VMDK file
Here you will find out:
- how to restore a VMware virtual machine from VMDK
- what would you need for that
- how DiskInternals VMFS Recovery can help you
Are you ready? Let's read!
VMware VM
By creating a virtual machine in VMware, you can eliminate a number of inconveniences.
Any virtual machine includes software and built-in applications, while it exists completely independent of the underlying OS. Thus, you can create several VMs on one computer and thereby get many advantages:
- Performance on each VM will be improved due to the distribution of “responsibilities” between each of them
- Any errors on one VM do not affect the operation of the others
- You can transfer the VM to any host, so it is mobile and convenient to use
To restore a VMware virtual machine from VMDK, what do you need?
Before you start recovering a VMware virtual machine, you need to find the existing VMDK (virtual machine disk) file. This file is very important since it plays a key role and contains all the information stored in the VM. There are several data files: .vmdk and flat.vmdk. To restore VM VMware from a VMDK file, you need to find the flat.vmdk file.
VMware virtual machine recovery in vSphere
Restoring a VM from a VMDK file is possible by creating a new virtual machine configuration file. In this case, you are using an existing .vmdk file.
In the VMware guide for restoring a VM in vSphere, it says that you need to “remove from inventory” your virtual machine. That method is suitable if you have a backup because otherwise, you can lose your data.
How to restore a VMDK file in a VMware workstation with VMFS Recovery
If you lost, deleted or for any other reason don’t have a flat VMDK file, you need to restore it using the software, because there are no other options. You definitely need a VMDK file to recreate a VM.
It is recommended to use DiskInternals VMFS Recovery — software for professionals and, at the same time, understandable and effective for casual users. This application is really cool thanks to many factors, and here are just some of them:
- You can restore both .vmdk files and -flat.vmdk files.
- It works with VMFS partitions based on ESX / ESXi VMware® ESX Server™ and VMware vSphere 3.5-6.5.
- FAT32, RAIDZ, HFS + and ReFS ZFS, EXT4, NTFS 5, EFS, ReiserFS, XFS, Hikvision, etc. are the file systems that this program works with.
- If the VMDK is on any of the RAID levels, that's no problem, as DiskInternals VMFS Recovery will handle restoring a VMDK file on VMware.
And now that you can restore the VMDK file, you can try to recreate the virtual machine with this file.