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I have a big file (220G) I would like to move from a virtual machine to its host.

The file is actually another virtual machine's disk file.

for other smaller files, I would have done that with a simple scp command moving them accros the network, but this is very slow (around 7 MB/s)

It is even more frustrating when you think about the fact the file is just moving on the same hard drive trough the network, that's just so inefficient.

How can I copy (or simply move) this single file out of this virtual server to the physical server? Using VMware vsphere (free edition)?

Vincent Duprez
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  • Why is your scp so slow if you are moving from a guest to the host? I don't think that's a network issue. It's probably because everything is on one drive and the disk just can't deal with all the I/O that is happening besides the file copy. If that is true then even a file system based copy will not work any faster than scp. – Reality Extractor Apr 03 '14 at 06:30
  • Could be.. but this seams ways to slow no? If I could just 'move' instead of copying.. – Vincent Duprez Apr 03 '14 at 09:03

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I don't think you can. This would be a rather serious security risk if you could just copy files from the VM into the host.

What's possible is mounting the VMDK on the ESX host, and then copy the files out from there. You might want to have a look at the VDDK (Virtual Disk Development Kit), as I think this is able to "mount" VMDK's.

There are also possibilities to mount the VMDK's on other hosts, but this would transfer the data over the network as well :) e.g. : http://www.diskinternals.com/vmfs-recovery/mounting-vmdk.shtml

MichelZ
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