Accessing VMare Disks — without VMware Server or Workstation

JR

I spent more time than necessary looking for a VMware disk mount utility to use on a Linux-based distribution. For windows, there’s the VMWare Workstation Disk Mount Utility (5.5) that can installed with the VMWare DiskMount GUI, but I couldn’t find the simple vmware-mount.pl program for Linux distros. Instead, I had to dig it out of a compatible VMWare Server package [for Linux], copy it to /usr/bin/ and create the necessary symlinks for operation. Here’s a quick breakdown of the steps:

  1. If you don’t already have it, grab a release of the VMWare Server for Linux — make sure you download the correct version for your distribution (32-bit or 64-bit). You do not need to install the package, simply download it and extract the contents. Alternatively, you could download the package to a Windows workstation and transfer the vmware-mount utility to your Linux workstation/server via SFTP, SCP, FTP, etc..
  2. After downloading the VMWare Server package, extract the vmware-mount utility from the following directory in the archive: [shell]\vmware-server-distrib\bin\vmware-mount[/shell]

  3. Copy vmware-mount to /usr/bin

    [shell]cp ~/vmware-mount /usr/bin/[/shell]

  4. The disk mount utility requires a couple of dependencies to run. You can try and run vmware-mount to determine what it needs. In my case, on Ubuntu 8.04LTS 64-bit, it required libcrypto.so.0.9.8 and libssl.so.0.9.8. The utility was looking for these files in a non-existent directory structure: [shell]/usr/bin/libdir/lib/lib*[/shell] Go ahead and create this directory structure (beats installing the VMWare server package), then provide symlinks to the actual lib files required by vmware-mount:

    [shell]sudo mkdir -p /usr/bin/libdir/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8; sudo mkdir -p /usr/bin/libdir/lib/libssl.so.0.9.8

    sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8 /usr/bin/libdir/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8/libcrypto.so.0.9.8

    sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libssl.so.0.9.8 /usr/bin/libdir/lib/libssl.so.0.9.8/libssl.so.0.9.8[/shell]

    • That’s it! Now you should be able to run ./vmware-mount to determine proper command usage.