VMFS is a clustered filesystem designed to store virtual machine disks for VMware ESX or ESXi Server hosts.
In Ubuntu Linux, there is a command line tool vmfs-tools
that allows to access VMFS filesystems from some other non ESX/ESXi host for e.g. maintenance tasks.
For now, only read access is available, but write access is under works. Multiple extents are supported.
Install vmfs-tools
in Ubuntu
vmfs-tools is available in Ubuntu Software Center.
Or use command:
sudo apt-get install vmfs-tools
Use vmfs-tools to mount VMFS filesystem
In terminal window, run this to find out your VMware VMFS partition:
sudo fdisk -l
For example, /dev/sdb5 is the vmfs that we want to mount. Just create a mount point (/mnt/vmfs) and use this command to mount it:
sudo vmfs-fuse /dev/sdb5 /mnt/vmfs
Now go on with this filesystem under /mnt/vmfs/