By Joe Piggee Sr.
Ok, I have received this question 4 times this week, via email, so decided to just put up a quick FAQ. “What files make up a VM, on ESXi 5?” Below you see a screenshot one of my virtual machines, which just happens to be also be my vCenter.
Quick Note: Virtual machines lock the .vswp, -flat.vmdk and -delta.vmdk, .vmx and .log files while powered on.
| File | Description |
| *.vmx | This is the configuration file for the VM. |
| *.vmxf | This is also a configuration file, but not really used. It’s main purpose is for compatibility. If you were to move a VM from ESXi to a VMWare Workstation installation, this file would be used. |
| *.vmsd | This is just a snapshot descriptor file, that stores metadata. As you see above, mine is 0KB, because I have not created any snapshots. |
| *.vmdk | This is the VM’s hard disk descriptor. This contains all the VM HD’s settings. Like how large etc.. |
| -flat.vmdk | This is the actual VM HD that contains the data. |
| *.log | VM Log Files, there maybe additional log file with vmname-(Number) that contain old versions of the logs |
| *.nvram | VM System Bios data |
| *.vswp | VM Swap File reated when the virtual machine boots and is used to swap memory if access to physical memory isn’t possible. Especially useful when ballooning. |
| *.lck | This is the file that has locked your running files. A running virtual machine creates lock files to prevent consistency problems on virtual disks. If the virtual machine did not use locks, multiple virtual machines might read and write to the disk, causing data corruption. Lock files are always created in the same directory as the .vmdk files |
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