Examine VMWare ESX with libguestfs

We worked out yesterday (thanks Matthias Bolte) how to use the libguestfs tools like virt-inspector and guestfish to examine VMWare VMs.

VMWare’s native disk format is VMDK, which is only partially understood by free tools like qemu-img. qemu-img breaks quite badly on the newer variant that ESX 4 uses. Then there’s the issue of how you get the VMDK file from VMWare’s storage. Use their proprietary storage APIs?

Well it turned out both problems could be solved easily. VMWare ESX servers make the storage available over https connections, so you can use a URL like https://root:password@esxserver/folder/ to browse available storage on the server. And VMWare also makes the raw (“flat”) disk images available in the same way.

libvirt has supported ESX management for a while (thanks again to Matthias Bolte), so you can do:

$ sudo virsh -c esx://192.168.2.121/?no_verify=1 list --all
Enter username for 192.168.2.121 [root]:
Enter root password for 192.168.2.121:
 Id Name                 State
----------------------------------
  - TestLinux            shut off
  - TestWin              shut off

(Note that the domains must be shut off before VMWare will allow you to access the flat disk images).

Then we can get the storage URL:

$ sudo virsh -c esx://192.168.2.121/?no_verify=1 dumpxml TestLinux > /tmp/xml
$ grep '<source file' /tmp/xml
      <source file='[Storage1] TestLinux/TestLinux.vmdk'/>

And from that storage URL you can grab the disk image directly:

$ wget --no-check-certificate 'https://root:password@192.168.2.121/folder/TestLinux/TestLinux-flat.vmdk?dcPath=ha-datacenter&dsName=Storage1'

The large flat file downloaded is a straight raw disk image that can be examined directly in programs like guestfish and virt-inspector:

$ virt-list-filesystems -al TestLinux-flat.vmdk
/dev/sda1 ext4
/dev/vg_testlinux/lv_root ext4
/dev/vg_testlinux/lv_swap swap

$ guestfish --ro -a TestLinux-flat.vmdk -m /dev/vg_testlinux/lv_root

Welcome to guestfish, the libguestfs filesystem interactive shell for
editing virtual machine filesystems.

Type: 'help' for help with commands
      'quit' to quit the shell

><fs> ll /
total 116
dr-xr-xr-x.  23 root root  4096 Dec 30 06:27 .
dr-xr-xr-x   29 root root     0 Dec 21 07:59 ..
-rw-r--r--.   1 root root     0 Dec 30 06:27 .autofsck
drwx------.   3 root root  4096 Dec 17 11:58 .dbus
-rw-r--r--.   1 root root     0 Dec 17 12:50 .readahead_collect
dr-xr-xr-x.   2 root root  4096 Dec 17 12:11 bin
[etc]

It’s probably also possible to avoid the download step, since libguestfs is built on qemu which should support http(s) connections directly, but I didn’t try this yet.