When you map a virtual disk and its associated volume to a drive on the host system, you can connect to the virtual disk without opening a virtual machine.
After you map the virtual disk to a drive on the host system, you cannot power on any virtual machine that uses the disk until you disconnect the disk from the host system.
Important: If you mount a virtual disk that has a snapshot and then write to the disk, you can irreparably damage a snapshot or linked clone created from the virtual machine. Note that
Workstation Player does not support taking snapshots or deleting them.
Mapping a virtual disk to a host system is not supported in the standalone version of Workstation Player. Virtual disk mapping is supported in the Workstation Player version included with Workstation Pro.
Prerequisites
- Power off all virtual machines that use the virtual disk.
- Verify that the virtual disk (.vmdk) files on the virtual disk are not compressed and do not have read-only permissions.
- On a Windows host, verify that the volume is formatted with FAT (12/16/32) or NTFS. Only FAT (12/16/32) and NTFS formatting is supported. If the virtual disk has mixed partitions, for example, one partition is formatted with a Linux operating system and another partition is formatted with a Windows operating system, you can map the Windows partition only.
- Verify that the virtual disk is unencrypted. You cannot map or mount encrypted disks.