The vSphere platform is in my opinion the most complete package for the virtualized datacenter . One of my gripes about it is the manipulation of data in the VMFS file system.. its mostly controlled via the vSphere client, and going deep into CLI on the host itself .That isn't a problem when you live only in a vSphere world but sometimes, for debugging or troubleshooting, an extra tool to get the data off of VMFS wouldn't hurt. Thats where this tip comes in, there are tools out there that you can use on different operating systems to mount the VMFS datastore. For this article we are going to be using Ubuntu 11.04 desktop to mount a VMFS hard drive. First off, we are going to need the tools, these are called simply VMFS-TOOLS, and luckily we can get it with a simple apt-get sudo apt-get install vmfs-tools Now this is a package install, so there are 3 commands included in this package: vmfs-fuse debugvmfs fsck.vmfs For th...