For IT administrators, developers, or homelab users running VMware ESXi, the VMFS (Virtual Machine File System) is the standard format for datastores. While Windows 10 does not natively support reading VMFS (unlike NTFS or exFAT), you can still access and read files from these drives using third-party tools.
VMFS is a clustered file system designed by VMware for simultaneous access by multiple ESXi hosts. It uses a block layout and metadata structure completely foreign to Windows 10. If you connect a VMFS-formatted drive (e.g., an SSD or HDD from an ESXi server) directly to a Windows 10 PC via SATA or USB, Windows will prompt you to initialize or format the disk—which would destroy the datastore. windows 10 read vmfs