Use Cases for the Virtual Disk Library

The VDDK provides access to virtual disks, enabling a range of use cases for application vendors including:

■	Back up a particular volume, or all volumes, associated with a virtual machine.

■	Connect a backup proxy to vSphere and back up all virtual machines on a storage cluster.

■	Read virtual disk and run off-line anti-virus scanning, or package analysis, of virtual machines.

■	Write to virtual disk to perform off-line centralized patching of virtual machines.

■	Manipulate virtual disks to defragment, expand, convert, rename, or shrink the file system image.

■	Perform data recovery or virus cleaning on corrupt or infected off-line virtual machines.