Interesting indeed. Scott Lowe & Mr. Brambley already did an excellent write up, so I’ll spare you more boring reading. However, this opens up some further cool uses for VMFS.
“This driver enables read-only access to files and folders on partitions formatted in the Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) by VMware. VMFS is a clustered file system that is used by the VMware ESX hosts to store virtual machines and virtual disk files. The VMFS driver is developed and maintained by fluid Operations and is included in upcoming releases of the eCloudManager product, where it is used to allow enhanced features like offloaded backups of virtual machines hosted on VMware ESX hosts. The VMFS driver comes with a command line interface (CLI) to mount and analyze VMFS volumes. The VMFS driver was tested on Linux and Windows based hosts, but should work on any platform that supports Java.”