This example has been used on a machine with VMware Workstation 9 installed locally.
To mount a VMDK-file you can use the VMware command vmware-mount like this

$ sudo vmware-mount /path/to/vmdk/file/name-of-vmdk-file.vmdk 1 /path/to/mount/point
In the example above we have mounted partition 1 in the VMDK-file from the disk /path/to/vmdk/file/name-of-vmdk-file.vmdk
The files are now accessible from the mount point /path/to/mount/point.

This has been tested in Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS.
This command is also available in the Windows version of VMware Workstation.