There are millions of posts on that topic all over the Internet. Just another repetition mostly for myself.
VMware has Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) which is more of an API for backup software vendors. But it includes a handy tool called vmware-mount, which gives you an ability to mount VMware virtual disks (.vmdk) from wherever you want.
Download VDDK from VMware site. It’s free. And then run vmware-mount with the following keys:
> vmware-mount driveletter: “[vmfs_datastore] vmname/diskname.vmdk” /i:”datacentername/vm/vmname” /h:vcname /u:username /s:password
Choose drive letter, specify vmdk path, inventory path to VM (put ‘vm’ in lowercase between datacenter and vm name, upper case will give you an error) and vCenter or ESXi host name.
Note however, that you can mount only vmdks from powered off VMs. But there is a workaround. You can mount vmdk from online VMs in read-only mode if you make a VM snapshot. Then the original vmdk won’t be locked by ESXi server and you will be able to mount it.
To unmount a vmdk run:
> vmware-mount diskletter: /d
There are also several GUI tools to mount vmdks. But vmware-mount is enough for me.
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