.VMX File Format

Introduction

A .vmx file is the primary configuration file of a VMware virtual machine. It holds the settings chosen in the New Virtual Machine Assistant or the machine's settings: memory, processors, the disks and CD-ROM drives, network adapters, the guest operating system and the file names of the other files that make up the machine. It is plain text, one key = "value" statement a line, and it is read by Workstation, Fusion and ESXi, and by tools such as libvirt.

Structure

A file is a list of statements: a name, an equals sign and a value in double quotes, with # comments. The first statement is usually .encoding, which says how the rest is encoded, followed by config.version and virtualHW.version. Names are not case-sensitive and use dots and colons to group related settings: scsi0:0.fileName is the file name of the device at position 0 of SCSI controller 0. The keys page lists the ones whose meaning a public source documents.

.encoding = "UTF-8"
config.version = "8"
virtualHW.version = "13"
displayName = "Test VM"
guestOS = "ubuntu-64"
memsize = "4096"
numvcpus = "2"
scsi0.present = "TRUE"
scsi0:0.present = "TRUE"
scsi0:0.fileName = "Test.vmdk"
ethernet0.present = "TRUE"
ethernet0.connectionType = "nat"

The viewer lists every statement with its meaning, groups the devices, lists the files the configuration names, and refuses lines that are not statements.

Not described

Known, not yet covered

• Reference: VMware's open-source tools carry larger key lists than libvirt reads; this page keeps to the keys the sources read this session (libvirt's vmx.c and VMware's knowledge-base articles) document.

Unknown

• Reference: VMware publishes no complete list of .vmx keys. Keys outside the documented ones are shown as written and labelled not described in the viewer's tree and tables.

Links