Backup question (vmdk's within a vmdk)

[Alceryes]

Trilead Explorer for backups

I added a second drive to me ESX whitebox.I added this drive as a 2nd drive to my VM that I have Trilead on. I am backing up my important VM's to this drive. So, from a physical level this drive just has one 500GB vmdk from the VM that I am running the backups from.

If I lose my primary datastore I also lose the VM that the backup datastore came from.

Question -  Is it possible (and would it be ease) to get into this vmdk from a Windows system to extract/restore the 5 VM's that it contains?

TIA!

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

In order to extract the virtual machines from the disk, you'd need to have drivers which understand the VMFS file system. I think the easiest way to access the files on the VMFS volume would be to install ESXi on a host (you can even install ESXi on an USB drive/stick), attach the disk and mount the datastore.

André

[Alceryes]

Thx André.