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A VMDK file is a virtual hard drive. It contains everything a physical hard drive would: boot sectors, partitions, file systems, and data. VMware virtual machines use VMDK files as their storage — from the VM's perspective, the VMDK is an actual hard drive. From the host's perspective, it's just a file.
The format supports thin provisioning (the file grows as data is written, not pre-allocated), snapshots (point-in-time copies for backup/rollback), and split files (multiple 2 GB chunks for FAT32 compatibility). A typical VMDK starts small and grows up to its configured maximum size.
VMware Workstation, VMware Fusion, and ESXi use VMDK natively. VirtualBox can also import VMDK files. QEMU's `qemu-img` converts between VMDK and other virtual disk formats (VDI, QCOW2, VHD). For forensics and data recovery, VMDK files can be mounted as regular drives using VMware's vmware-mount tool or OSFMount (free).