I'm in the unfortunately position where I have a data store with a punctured RAID, most of the VM's on it are of no concern bar 1 which can be moved, however the data store affected has ESXi installed on it (the OS). I just wondered if its possible to replicate the datastore completely to a new health unit I have created so I can delete and recreate the faulty store.
> I just wondered if its possible to replicate the datastore completely to a new health unit I have created so I can delete and recreate the faulty store.
That maybe possible if you provide a VMFS header dump - see
Create a VMFS-Header-dump using an ESXi-Host in production | VM-Sickbay
Can I ask what you need it for exactly?. Just so I understand.
When you are lucky the VMFS metadata dump will enable me to create dd scripts with which we can extract your flat and delta.vmdks.
The dump itself often has the vmx-files and all the vmdk-descriptorfiles.
Is there no way to just replicate the drive to a health data store that's been generated?
We do not have enough background info to answer that question.