Virtual machines created with VMware products typically use virtual disks.
The virtual disks,stored as files on the host computer or on a remote storage device,
appear to the guestoperating systems as standard disk drives.
This technical note begins with a high-level introduction to the layout of the files that make up
aVMware virtual disk of the type used by VMware Workstation 4,
VMware Workstation 5, VMwareWorkstation 6,
VMware Player, VMware Fusion, VMware GSX Server 3, VMware Server, andVMware ESX Server 3.
It then drills down into the details of the data structures inside thosevirtual disk files.