I have guest DC that crashed sometime in March, but I recovered the guest OS using backup. However, huge VMDK files(RAID 5 of which 2 of 4 drives failed) were not being backup. We sent all 4 drives to a recovery company and it was recovery. I created a datastore to host the 2TB flat VMDK file, uploaded the flat VMDK file successfully. The guest OS is runing and I need to attach the VMDK file to access data. I went to the settings, add hard drive, select datastore2, and no VMDK file present. I was reading some stuff online that I may need to recreate the VMDK descriptor file. Any ideas? -Thanks.
Welcome to the Community - Did they also recover a server.vmdk file - this is the file that contains the information about the virtual disk - the -flat.vmdk is where the data is stored - so if the server.vmdk file was recovered just copy it into the same diirectory of the -flat.vmfk file.
I do see the server.vmdk file and the server-flat.vmdk file. I will try uploading that. Thank you!
If you have the flat file and not the original VMDK, you can create a new one.
Be sure to make a backup of the flat file before trying to do this...
There were several VMDK files: server1.vmdk, server1-flat.vmdk, server2.vmdk, server2-flat.vmdk, server3.vmdk, and server3-flat.vmdk. I was able to upload both server1.vmdk and server2.vmdk(both are approximately 400GB), but the server3.vmdk has 2TB. When uploaded onto the datastore, it shows 0KB and provisioned size is 2TB. When I open my computer, there is no additional drive. When I open device manager, the OS wants me to initialize a disk(which is probably that 2TB drive). Anyone has seen this before? Any input would be greatly appreciated!
do not initialize a disk if you think it should have data on it !
Instead try to rebuild the partition table and partition-bootsectors with the tool "Testdisk"
Interesting - today I saw a VM at a customers location that suddenly lost driveletters for 3 large vmdks.
I was able to fix it with testdisk but wonder why it happened at all
Is it possible that VMWare has a limit of 2TB for files?
Yes for vmdk the limit is 2TB.
So if it's over 2TB, what are my options? Split it into two?
You can present a physical rdm to VM up to 64TB. Page 4 of this doc Raw Device Mapping size (physical compatibility) 64TB http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere5/r51/vsphere-51-configuration-maximums.pdf
The datastore is over 2.75TB but the actual VMDK file is over 2TB. If it's up to 64TB, then there should not be any problem viewing the VMDK file...right?
As I mentioned, the vmdk limit is 2TB and physical RDM size limit is 64 TB. vmdk specifically means that you are carving out a file from your SAN. RDM is raw device mapping where you are physically presenting the lun to your VM.