Steve Beaver
VMTN Forum Moderator

**Virtualization is a journey, not a project.**

"From the service console, you can view and manipulate files in the /vmfs/volumes
directory in mounted VMFS volumes with ordinary file commands, such as ls and cp.
Although mounted VMFS volumes might appear similar to any other file system, such
as ext3, VMFS is primarily intended to store large files, such as disk images with the
size of up to 2TB. You can use ftp, scp, and cp commands for copying files to and from
a VMFS volume as long as the host file system supports these large files."

I should clarify my statement a bit. If you're using ESX3 you can use standard *nix commands like ftp, scp, and cp commands for copying files, but it's is a very inefficient way of copying/moving files. vmkfstools is much better at this and is always the recommend way.

ftp, scp, and cp commands operate in the following manner

1. program says "i need a block to write data"

2. block is given

3.data is written

4. repeat until all data is copied

scsi reservations may occur during this process

vmkfstools operates in the following manner

1. I need X blocks

2. X blocks are given

2. data is written