Find the physical or logical drive hosting the VMFS storage in the left-hand navigation panel.
If your goal is simply to access the files on a VMFS 6 volume without risk of data corruption, the safest method is always to let an actual VMware ESXi host manage the storage. If you have a spare or existing ESXi host: Connect the storage to the ESXi host. Go to .
: It features automatic space reclamation (UNMAP), block-level access, and multi-host locking mechanisms. mount vmfs 6 windows hot
If you can safely power off your ESXi host or physically remove the disk, you can attach the disk to a Windows machine and use a read-only tool to extract data. This is not “hot” (the volume is offline to VMware), but it’s often safer.
The standard Windows operating system cannot natively read or mount VMware Virtual Machine File System 6 (VMFS 6) partitions. VMFS is a proprietary, clustered file system designed by VMware for ESXi hosts, and Windows does not include the necessary drivers to parse its structure. Attempting to mount or initialize a VMFS 6 volume using native Windows Disk Management will result in the drive showing up as "RAW" or prompting you to format it, which will destroy your data. Find the physical or logical drive hosting the
If the drive does not appear, open Disk Management, right-click, and select "Rescan Disks."
Select (do not select "Create Datastore," as creating a new one will format the drive). Select the existing VMFS 6 volume. This is not “hot” (the volume is offline
Set up a network share (SMB/CIFS from a Windows VM, or NFS/Samba from a Linux VM) targeting the required data.