VMWare Server 1.0.8 on Ubuntu Linux 8.10 Host: Is it possible to use an encrypted disk on the host machine as a physical disk for a virtual machine? I can't find any information on doing this at all, save for this comment in the VMWare feature suggestion board. It was posted last year and leads me to believe this is not possible. The reason I'm still asking this question is because that info is 1 year old and surely somebody might know a workaround (or a better way to do this).

dm-crypt, cryptsetup and luks were used to set up several encrypted partitions on /dev/sda. I want to be able to mount these partitions on a virtual machine. They work just fine on the host machine.

When I try adding the drive (/dev/sda) or the partitions to the VM via the VMWare interface (even as root), I get permission denied errors ("insufficient permission to access file"). This happens if I don't decrypt the drive beforehand, and it happens when I do (and mount the partitions read-only to the host filesystem). Either way I can't use the entire disk or the individual partitions.

I've tried setting /dev/mapper/(entry) as the physical disk for the machine but VMWare won't recognize /dev/mapper entries as a drive.

I also tried upgrading to VMWare Server 2.0 but that product is laughably bad. I don't know if it will do what I need or not since it is too slow and too buggy for me to even install the VM.

The encrypted disk in question is removable and used on multiple machines, the rest of which are not virtual. So creating a virtual disk for the virtual machine and encrypting that would not work.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!