Sunday, January 8, 2023

How to mount VMFS 6 in Debian https://www.nakivo.com/blog/mount-vmfs-datastore-in-linux-windows-esxi/

 

How to mount VMFS 6 in Ubuntu

  1. Create a directory to be used as a mount point to mount VMFS 6 in Linux:

mkdir /mnt/vmfs6

Note: If you try to mount the VMFS 6 file system in Linux with vmfs-fuse, you get an error because vmfs-fuse supports VMFS 3 and VMFS 5 but doesn’t support VMFS 6. In this case, the following message appears:

VMFS: Unsupported version 6
Unable to open filesystem

VMFS tools don’t support VMFS 6

You need to install VMFS6-tools which contains vmfs6-fuse that is used to mount VMFS 6 in Linux. You can find VMFS6-tools on a website with deb packages: https://packages.debian.org/sid/vmfs6-tools
  1. Download the current version of VMFS6-tools:

wget http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/v/vmfs6-tools/vmfs6-tools_0.1.0-3_amd64.deb

  1. Install the downloaded deb package:

dpkg -i vmfs6-tools_0.1.0-3_amd64.deb

Installing VMFS 6 tools to mount VMFS in Linux

Note: libc6 >= 2.28 is required to install VMFS6-tools. If you use Ubuntu 18, you may encounter errors during installation for this reason.

  1. Now you can mount VMFS in Ubuntu 20 to /mnt/vmfs6 with the command:

vmfs6-fuse /dev/sdc1 /mnt/vmfs6

Viewing contents of a VM datastore with VMFS in Linux

The VMFS 6 file system has been successfully mounted in Ubuntu 20 in read-only mode. Now you can copy VM files to the needed location. You can temporarily run copied VMs on Linux with VMware Workstation installed or on a Windows machine with VMware Workstation or Hyper-V until your ESXi server hardware is repaired or a new server is delivered (if you don’t have another ESXi host to run the VMs).

Remember that when you copy thin provisioned disks from a VMFS file system to ext4, NTFS, or other conventional file systems, the virtual disk files take up as much space as if they were thick provisioned. That’s why be ready to prepare enough disk space.

How to mount VMFS with multiple extents in Linux

Let’s look at a more complex example of mounting VMFS in Linux when a VMFS volume consists of two extents. We have two disks of the same size, which are combined into a single VMFS volume (datastore12).

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