Mounting a VMware disk image
============================

Inspect the disk image:

    # fdisk -l /path/to/image.vmdk
    Device              Boot   Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
    blahblah.vmdk1 *       2048  1026047  1024000  500M 83 Linux
    blahblah.vmdk2      1026048 33554431 32528384 15.5G 8e Linux LVM

Looks good. The first partition must be a boot partition, but we're trying to
extract the other stuff, which is inside the LVM.

Update the device mapper:

    # kpartx -av /path/to/image.vmdk

This will invoke a loopback mount and result in devices:

    # ls /dev/mapper/loop*
    /dev/mapper/loop0p1
    /dev/mapper/loop0p2

For RHEL9 and up, the device must be made available to LVM explicitly:

    # lvmdevices  --adddev /dev/mapper/loop0p2

Do a vgscan(8) to ensure that the VG shows up. If it doesn't, try restarting
the metadata cache daemon:

    # service lvm2-lvmetad restart
    # vgscan
    Found volume group "fabulousvg" using metadata type lvm2

Excellent. Let's activate:

    # vgchange -ay fabulousvg
    # ls /dev/mapper/fabulousvg*
    /dev/mapper/fabulousvg-root
    /dev/mapper/fabulousvg-swap

Proceed to do the extraction.

Dismounting the disk image
==========================

After umount(8)'ing, deactivate the VG:

    # vgchange -an fabulousvg

..and remove the mapped device:

    # kpartx -dv /path/to/image.vmdk