I have the image of a several large disks each containing a large number (hundreds) of VMs. Disks are exclusively in the vmdk format.
Any suggestions as to an efficient approach to parse them all in order to extract files with specific extensions? My current thinking is to mount the image and then run a batch script to mount each image in turn (e.g. using VMWare's Disk Mount utility) and perform the required extraction.
Yes I think a script is in order.
Would be funny if you mounted the large disk image, then mounted the included VMware image only to find another collection of images inside the VMWare image.
Reminds me of the movie, Inception…..
Another thought. Rather than doing multiple levels of mounting you might want to copy out the VMWare images to a physical drive before starting (just for reasons of efficiency).
You could also use Ken Kato's VDK (it depends on the actual VMDK formats used).
Or, if the single VMDK is small enough to fit in RAM (and you have enough RAM, and you have a 64 bit OS) you may want to try OFS mount (based on IMDISK) as it could be faster in access
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Also, to find the files in it - since I presume that the drives are formatted as NTFS, you could use
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or NDFF (that should be faster)
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jaclaz
Many thanks for the suggestions. Process is now running.
So far no 'VMDKs within VMDKs', but there's still time… )