Introduction

A VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk) is a file format used for virtual appliances developed for VMware products. The
format is a container for virtual machine hard disk drives to be used in virtual machines. VMware manages all
VMDKs within a virtual machine and is able to snapshot these VMDKs.
A guest iSCSI volume is added accessed by a virtual machine directly using a 3rd party software iSCSI initiator. In
most instances this 3rd party initiator is provided by Microsoft. This software initiator has direct access to the
LUN/Volume from the SAN. These iSCSI volumes are referred to as guest volumes as VMware is unaware of
their existence and is unable to manage or snapshot these volumes.

When to use VMDK

VMDKs should be used wherever possible for static data such as application binaries. This will allow VMware
to manage access to the VMDK as well as dump active memory and quiesce the virtual machine.
Recent performance studies have shown that since vSpheres initial release, developments have been made to
the vStorage APIs which have increased performance of VMDKs to surpass that of guest iSCSI.

When to use Guest iSCSI

Storage vendors have their own tool kits that support VSS management of application consistent snapshots.
Guest iSCSI volumes should only be used when these tools are available. This is limited to the following server
types:
Microsoft Exchange
Microsoft SQL
Microsoft Hyper-V
Microsoft File Services
Microsoft Cluster Services