VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit
Last week saw a rather interesting release: a VDDK – Virtual Disk Development Kit by VMware, which seems to be a complete toolset for working with VMware VMDK disk images and coding your own applications which interface with them.
Virtual Machine Disk Format (VMDK image specification) is used by many vendors, and so such an SDK from VMware is a great way to reinforce VMDK position on the market.
What is VMware VDDK?
Virtual Disk Development Kit is essentially the following three things:
- VMDK disks mount utility (mounting Windows or Linux partitions directly from VMDK images)
- VMDK disks management utility (growing VMDK images and changing their type, even shrinking VMDK images under certain conditions)
- VMDK Virtual Disk API – a programmatic interface to access VMDK images from your applications
Virtual Disk API
According to documentation, Virtual Disk API allows you to do the following:
- It permits random read/write access to data anywhere in a VMDK file.
- It creates and manages redo logs (parent‐child disk chaining, or delta links).
- It can read and write disk metadata.
- It is able delete VMDK files.
- Error explanations are available.
- Many operations are easier to automate with an API than with utilities.
Virtual Disk API is a stand‐alone library that you can use to develop solutions and applications.
See also
- Download VDDK
- Interesting details on VDDK by Hari Krishnan, Infrastructure Product Manager for VDDK in VMware
- VMDK interface
- Virtual Disk Development Kit page
