As of the VDDK 1.1 release, you can use the disk mount API (vixMntapi) for local and remote mounting of virtual disks. The vmware-mount command does this too. VixMntapi involves a separate library for loading.
Caution The vixMntapi library for Windows supports advanced transport for SAN and HotAdd, but for Linux the vixMntapi library supports only local and LAN transport (file, nbd, nbdssl).