How to steal a virtual machine and its data in 3 easy steps
There are basically two ways one could access the virtual disk (.vmdk) file of a virtual machine. The first would be using the ESX Service Console. If someone knew the root password or had a user account on the host, they could gain access to the VMFS volumes that contain the virtual machine files and use copy tools like Secure Copy, or SCP, to copy files from it. The second is using the vSphere/VMware Infrastructure Client which contains a built-in datastore browser; this is the method we will cover here.
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