How to move vmdk without storage vmotion

[xevrebyc]

We had a LUN that had an extent which was deleted.  I am now unable to inccrease the size of the datastore because the extent is missing.  svMotion also fail to move the disk.  Is it possible to copy all the vmdk files to a new datastore and reattach?  This datastore has the transaction log for our exchange server.  Currently powered down.

[Fatalglitch]

VMware does not write to extents in a manner like "Fill extent1, then fill extent2, then fill extent3, etc", it mixes writes amongst the extents. If you have deleted one of the extents, I'm afraid it's very likely your data is corrupted, and segments of the VMDK's will be missing.

You might want to contact VMware support, and see if they have any tricks or ways to determine which VMDK files may still be valid.

[xevrebyc]

datastore-####.vmdk are just snapshots correct?  The disk in question has just run out of space.  It was on the datastore before the extent was added and deleted.  I cannot consolidate the snapshots. Nor are there any in the snapshot manager.

[a_p_]

What you could try is to clone the virtual disk to another datastore using

vmkfstools -i <current-snaphot>.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/target-datastore/target-folder/vmname.vmdk

To run the command you'll need to create the folder on the target datastore in advance.

André