My google-fu seems to be broken right now, so I’ll ask the interweb in general, with the hopes that some kind soul from VMWare will be able to help me out. I’m looking for a way to mount a VMWare ESX (VI 3.5 in particular) VMDK disk file on a local system. This used to be available with the vmware-mount.pl script, but it seems this is no longer (search for vmware-mount).
Currently the round-trip time to correct simple bugs in the ESX virtual machines I’m in charge of setting up and sending to a QA cycle is in the magnitude of hours due to having to upload an image to the ESX server (which has a somehow stupendously slow VMFS filesystem for storage, but that’s another issue), fixing the bug, re-cleaning up the image (removing bash_history, etc), re-downloading the image back to my workstation, zipping it up, and sending it to QA.
Being able to mount the vmdk on my local system, edit it, and then upload that to QA would make my life (and my bosses) far easier than it is now.
Does anyone have any idea how to do this, or what the channel to get a bug into the VMware guys’ ears are?
TIA
Update: Looks like my question to the forums got some answers…. look good, will have to try those tomorrow.