Skip to content

VMDK

Definition

VMware Virtual Machine Disk. The on-host file that holds the guest VM's disk contents, either as a monolithic file or split into 2 GB chunks. Sparse, preallocated and stream-optimised variants exist.

Related terms

Files on-Demand
Microsoft OneDrive feature that represents cloud-only files as 0-byte placeholders on the local NTFS volume, marked with a reparse tag IO_REPARSE_TAG_CLOUD. The...
Qcow2
QEMU Copy-On-Write version 2. The native disk format for QEMU and KVM hypervisors, with built-in snapshot, compression and encryption support. Used widely...
Reparse Point
An NTFS attribute that redirects file access to another handler. Cloud providers use reparse tags to insert their sync drivers between the...
Snapshot Chain
A parent VMDK or VHDX plus one or more child differential disks. Each child captures changes since its parent was snapshotted. Reading...
VHDX
Microsoft's second-generation virtual hard disk format, used by Hyper-V and recent Windows containers. Supports up to 64 TB, has block-level CRC, and...

Explained in

Your journey to becoming a forensic professional starts here.

Practice with mock tests, learn from structured notes, and get your questions answered by a global forensic community, all in one place.