ESX vmfs deleted

[mredwarren]

Hello everyone,

I am in a dire need of some assistance!  My tech and I was having an issue restoring an Exchange VM (something to do with VSS) and not enough space on the datastore. We decided to free up some space by deleting some old files from out of the NFS storage that is being shared with two ESXi hosts. Well here is where things went bad.

Apparently some files inside one of those folders were somehow being used by our Domain File Server (DFS)/Printer Server. After they were deleted that server will not boot up and reference that it needs that '.vmdk' file. We lost access to all files located in our Netapp storage as well as access to the printer server for printing. We searched our backups Netbackup 7 (outdated I know) which backs up our Netapps storage volumes.

We tried finding the /vmfs volume on the backup tapes but could not locate them - I think we need some sort of treasure map!!! We found the regular user files that are stored in NFS but no VMs and none of the ESX related folders.

Question - Is there some way to recover what we have lost even though we deleted the files? I saw some tools such as VMFS Recovery?

I am extremely desperate.....

Thanks for any assistance.

Ed

[mredwarren]

It worked!!! You rock!!! I would love to know how you recreated it for my knowledge.

I cannot say how much I appreciate your assistance, experience, and everything else!

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Ed

[a_p_]

Glad to hear that it worked. Please don't forget to delete the snapshots unless you need them ("Delete All" from the Snapshot Manager), so that - besides disk space usage - your backup application can properly enable Changed Block Tracking again.

I would love to know how you recreated it for my knowledge.

The important part was to find out the exact provisioned size. Since you had that snapshot, it was pretty easy. I simply checked the metadata with a small Excel-Tool that I created some time ago.

With the size shown (in 512 byte blocks/sectors), I then created a dummy VM on one of my ESXi hosts, took a snapshot, and edited the .vmdk files so that they met your needs.

With the correct input, and some experience, re-creating descriptor files is not a rocket science.

André