Originally loosely based on the vmfs code from fluidOps, this set of tools has since evolved to handle more features from VMFS, such as extents, and allows to access VMFS through the standard Linux VFS with the help of the FUSE framework.
While it is still work in progress and is not destined for production use yet, it can be of some help for some people.
vmfs-tools is developped by Christophe Fillot <cf (at) utc.fr> and Mike Hommey <mh (at) glandium.org>.
vmfs-tools is free software/open source, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 or any later version.
A vmfs-tools package is available in Debian and Ubuntu. It is also known to be used in Clonezilla.
To get a full build of vmfs-tools, you need the following prerequisites:
From the above list, only the first three are strictly required.
The lack of libfuse's development files will result in the vmfs-fuse program not being built.
The lack of asciidoc, xsltproc or docbook-xsl will result in no manual pages (though you can still look at the .txt files within the source tarball).
Building vmfs-tools should be as simple as running `make' or `gmake`,
depending on how GNU make's binary is named on your system.
To install vmfs-tools, just run `make install' (or `gmake install').
The install location for the binaries is $prefix/sbin, $prefix/share/man
for the manual pages, where $prefix is /usr/local by default.
If you wish to install to some other place, you can override $prefix with the command `make install prefix=/some/where'.
vmfs-tools has been verified to build on GNU/Linux, FreeBSD 7.2, Opensolaris 2009.06 and Cygwin 1.5.25. See the README file in the source tarball for more details about specific details for these platforms.
Please use the github issue tracker to report bugs.