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/