ESXi

Hello, just a quick question which Google didn't help me awnser.

I have worked with ESXi for a while now, but I have always used the "Converter" to take so called "backups" since I could then also change those locally (and I have needed that from time to time).

But now I just need a regular backup, so I decided to download a machine from the "storage", so in other words I selected a folder in the Datastore Browser and clicked "download", and that went fine, especially because it is alot faster than the converter (at least on my current system).

But it downloads to something like:
- machinename.vmsd

- machinename.vmx

- machinename.vmxf

- machinename-flat.vmdk

Now what I am thinking is that the "-flat" file is all the files with a few exceptions stored in one big one.

What am I to make of that?
Also, when I need to restore (if it happens) will this file automatically expand to the previous files on the ESX or will it remain as a "flat" file?...
And will it then work?

The flat file is part of the virtual disk.  There are two parts of a virtual disk.  Let's say your VM is called server01.  When you access the console for ESXi and run ls in the folder you see server01.vmdk and server01-flat.vmdk.   server01.vmdk is a small plain text file which describes the characteristics of the virtual disk.  server01-flat.vmdk is the file that contains the virtual disk data.  You need both files for a virtual disk, although you can recreate the server01.vmdk file fairly easily.   For a restore you would want the vmx file,  vmdk and flat.vmdk.

You can find info on the other file extensions here - http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_learning_files_in_a_vm.html.

ok so:

machinename.vmdk (on the server, XXGB)

becomes:

machinename-flat.vmdk (XXGB)

machinename.vmdk (small file)

and that will be ok in reverse when uploading it again I take...

Cheers

It's the just the vSphere client that makes vmdk and flat.vmdk appear as a single file.  When I select the vmx and vmdk file for a VM to download to my PC I end up with 3 files - vmx, vmdk and flat.vmdk.