Hello all,
I have a weird problem that I can't seem to solve. I am using vmware-mount on 64-bit Ubuntu 11.10 to mount remote disks that are on an ESXi 4.1 hypervisor. I mount the disk as a flat representation and mount specific partitions manually via loopback devices.
When mounting an ext4 partition on the remote disk, everything works great. When mounting an NTFS partition, there appears to be a serious write problem. Mounting and then unmounting is quick; mounting, writing to the disk and unmounting takes about 30 seconds per MB written. Specifically it's the unmount that takes a long time (I assume because it's flushing all the writes and won't complete the unmount until they're done).
I copied the remote disk directly to my Ubuntu machine's local filesystem, and ran the same commands. This effectively resolves the write delay, so it seems to be something to do with the way vmware-mount reads and writes to remote disks with NTFS partitions.
Is there any obvious solution to this problem, other than using a different NFS system on the hypervisor itself to make the VMDKs available to other machines? I'm able to provide any more information that might help solve the write problem.