ESXi Missing Files in Multiple Datastores

[hakasapl]

Hello All,

We have an issue with two of our datastores. Both datastores have two disks in them. After moving our server, we booted the machine (unknowingly) with one of the drives disconnected. I've reconnected the drive and rebooted, but it seems like a number of files on the datastore are missing. I'm unable to run voma utility because it says that you cannot run it on vmfs datastore that use multiple extents (both datastores are made up of two extents).

The data we've "lost" is important, so anything that can help me recover it would be greatly appreciated!

- Hakan

[continuum]

Hi

sorry - right now I am in a hurry ...

I deal with this cases quite often - see for example Datastore gone missing / Extents Missing

Please provide more details and dont try anything before we know which extent exactly is missing.

If possible stop all activity on the affected datastore.

Ulli

[hakasapl]

Thanks for your quick response, I've just stopped the VMs using the datastore.

All the extents show up in the OS right now. The main datastore we use for VM files are two 4tb SSDs, making 8tb usable storage. That datastore has missing files. We also have another datastore made from 2 HDDs that held only snapshots, but all the snapshots are missing from that datastore. This doesn't make sense because the drives in that datastore never got disconnected like one of the drives in the first datastore did.

Also, (most likely because of the missing files), after we moved the server many of the VMs were marked "invalid", even though some of their files were still there.

Let me know if you'd like more specifics.

[hakasapl]

I would like to add that we have been using this hypervisor even with missing files the past few days. I was not aware I needed to stop using the datastore.

[hakasapl]

What would you recommend as a next step for this situation?

Thanks,

Hakan