Basically I used the wrong command to overwrite maybe the MFT table of a good vmfs :3 partition. GPT table is sound. The command used is below and after that all files are gone.
# vmkfstools -C vmfs5 -b 1m -S datastore1 /dev/disks/naa.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:3
# ls -al /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/
total 793600
drwxr-xr-t 1 root root 1260 Jul 13 05:58 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 512 Jul 13 05:59 ..
-r-------- 1 root root 4915200 Jul 13 05:58 .fbb.sf
-r-------- 1 root root 267026432 Jul 13 05:58 .fdc.sf
-r-------- 1 root root 1179648 Jul 13 05:58 .pb2.sf
-r-------- 1 root root 268435456 Jul 13 05:58 .pbc.sf
-r-------- 1 root root 262733824 Jul 13 05:58 .sbc.sf
drwx------ 1 root root 280 Jul 13 05:58 .sdd.sf
-r-------- 1 root root 4194304 Jul 13 05:58 .vh.sf
#
The files are mostly still there according the overnight scan by "DiskInternals VMFS Recovery 3.3" (eval version).
Can you suggest the next step?
