[libvirt-users] access VMX config on esxi with virsh

[Matthias Bolte]

2010/9/17 frank dirks <frankdirks at gmx.net>:
> Hi,
>
> Is virsh able to access the VMX config of a virtual machine running on a
> esxi host?
>
>
> I would like to take backups of my virtual machine configs and the
> doku section
> "Converting from VMware VMX config to domain XML config"
> (http://libvirt.org/drvesx.html) comes close to this - but does not tell how
> to get access to the vmx file. I would prefer a solution where ssh access to
> the esxi host can stay disabled.
>
> best regards, frank

virsh (and libvirt) don't expose the .vmx files, so there is no way to
access them directly trough libvirt. You could get the domain XML
config and convert it to .vmx format using domxml-to-native, but that
doesn't give you the original .vmx file.

The .vmx files are stored in the datastore attached to the ESX(i)
server. You don't need SSH to access the datastore content, An
example, you can access the .vmx file of the virtual machine <vm> on
<esxi-server> stored in <datastore> using this URL:

  https://<esxi-server>/folder/<vm>/<vm>.vmx?dcPath=ha-datacenter&dsName=<datastore>

You can also open https://<esxi-server>/folder/ in your web browser
and navigate through the content.

Matthias