I have an Ubuntu VM with 3 partitions. One is the main partition, one is a small swap-space partition, and the last is a 3rd partition with 20 GB of storage space.
I imagined these 3 would be separated into 3 .vmdk files, so it would be a nice modular file format. However, I go look and I have 22 .vmdk files! What are all of these? And is there any files that separate the 3 partitions? For example, if I keep backups of my VM and want to revert to a months old version, but keep my current 3rd storage partition, is there a single file with this that I can keep?
I dont have vmware installed here but from memory when you are creating the image in the first place there is an option to split the vmdk files into 2GB chunks set as default.
If you check the size of the files and they are all the same size this is probably why.
I have always disabled this option so I'm not sure about backing up files. I assume there should be 3 different variations of file name (one for each drive) in the directory.
The following post identifies the VMware utility on consolidating/converting to the single file .vmdk format:
How to change a VM from split across multiple .vmdk files to a single one or two?
The .vmdk definitions are based on virtualized drives, not partitions where a single drive can host/contain multiple partitions. Some folks may split partitions across multiple drives for flexibility in utilizing different physical drives with varying performance capabilities (e.g. fast vs. less expensive drives=slower).