How can a normal vSphere admin figure out where the .sbc.sf file is located on a VMFS 6 datastore ?

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How can a normal vSphere admin figure out where the .sbc.sf files is located on a VMFS 6 datastore ?

For any file that is created on a VMFS-volume by a VM : vmx, vmdks, flat.vmdks, vswp .... there exists a supported procedure to figure out the exact location on the underlying VMFS-filesystem.

For any other file  that a root-admin user can create on a VMFS-volume like "I wish it was sunday.txt" or "call-aunt-dorothy.sh" the same procedure works:

1. make sure fileX is not locked by any process

2. vmkfstools -p 0 fileX

This works for all files that use the inode-type file or directory - maybe also for the type rdm.

How can we do the same for inode-type 5 - the system files .

.fbb.sf       .fdc.sf       .pbc.sf       .sbc.sf       .vh.sf       .pb2.sf       .jbc.sf

For the vh.sf that is not necessary - as we already know the location: offset 17 mb, size 7mb - one piece.

For all the others there is no well known procedure to read out the location on the volume.

I need a set of instructions that we can give to a regular vSphere user so that his user will be able to collect the system files to ask for support.

This was not a real problem with VMFS 3 and 5.

Here we simply copied the first few hundred mbs - or to be sure the first 2GB.

This works for newly installed VMFS 6 too - but when it is a large and busy datastore the .sbc.sf systemfile fragments like crazy so that we have to expect that fragments can be located anywhere on the volume.

So here is the question:

1. how can I persuade  the vmkfstools -p 0 command  to do

vmkfstools -p 0 .sbc.sf

or

2. how can I persuade the vmkfstools -P -v10 command to print out size and range for the Volume Metadata

vmkfstools -P  -v 10 /vmfs/volumes/8tb-esxi7/

...

Volume Metadata size: 1913323520

Volume Metadata range: 4gb

or

3. is there any other ESXi  buildin tool available that could give the same information

Thanks for reading

Ulli

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For anybody who wants to see numbers on the table ....

Live was easy when a sbc.sf was stored on the disk like this:

	offset-sbc.sf = 0	offset-partition = 159	size-of= fragment = 320
	offset-sbc.sf = 320	offset-partition = 754	size-of= fragment = 705

We just dumped the first 2gb and had a good enough probabilty to get all .sf files complete with a 2gb dump.

Nowadays with VMFS 6 a sbc.sf may be located on disk like this:

	offset-sbc.sf = 0	offset-partition = 258	size-of= fragment = 320
	offset-sbc.sf = 320	offset-partition = 853	size-of= fragment = 705
	offset-sbc.sf = 1025	offset-partition = 46719	size-of= fragment = 1
	offset-sbc.sf = 1068	offset-partition = 49681	size-of= fragment = 26
	offset-sbc.sf = 1094	offset-partition = 49724	size-of= fragment = 1
	offset-sbc.sf = 1095	offset-partition = 49732	size-of= fragment = 2
	offset-sbc.sf = 1097	offset-partition = 49739	size-of= fragment = 3
	offset-sbc.sf = 1100	offset-partition = 49746	size-of= fragment = 1
	offset-sbc.sf = 1101	offset-partition = 49748	size-of= fragment = 72
	offset-sbc.sf = 1026	offset-partition = 49897	size-of= fragment = 40
	offset-sbc.sf = 1066	offset-partition = 50074	size-of= fragment = 1
	offset-sbc.sf = 1067	offset-partition = 50185	size-of= fragment = 1
	offset-sbc.sf = 1173	offset-partition = 120870	size-of= fragment = 4
	offset-sbc.sf = 1177	offset-partition = 120877	size-of= fragment = 11
	offset-sbc.sf = 1188	offset-partition = 177923	size-of= fragment = 1
	offset-sbc.sf = 1189	offset-partition = 177927	size-of= fragment = 7
	offset-sbc.sf = 1196	offset-partition = 178032	size-of= fragment = 1
	offset-sbc.sf = 1197	offset-partition = 178088	size-of= fragment = 1
	offset-sbc.sf = 1198	offset-partition = 178112	size-of= fragment = 10
	offset-sbc.sf = 1208	offset-partition = 178135	size-of= fragment = 14
	offset-sbc.sf = 1222	offset-partition = 178315	size-of= fragment = 1
	offset-sbc.sf = 1223	offset-partition = 178317	size-of= fragment = 13
	offset-sbc.sf = 1236	offset-partition = 178331	size-of= fragment = 2
	offset-sbc.sf = 1238	offset-partition = 178341	size-of= fragment = 3
	offset-sbc.sf = 1241	offset-partition = 178387	size-of= fragment = 2
	offset-sbc.sf = 1243	offset-partition = 178426	size-of= fragment = 22
	offset-sbc.sf = 1265	offset-partition = 178449	size-of= fragment = 2
	offset-sbc.sf = 1267	offset-partition = 178468	size-of= fragment = 2
	offset-sbc.sf = 1269	offset-partition = 178561	size-of= fragment = 1
	offset-sbc.sf = 1270	offset-partition = 178563	size-of= fragment = 1
	offset-sbc.sf = 1271	offset-partition = 178565	size-of= fragment = 2
	offset-sbc.sf = 1273	offset-partition = 178589	size-of= fragment = 1
	offset-sbc.sf = 1274	offset-partition = 178591	size-of= fragment = 2
	offset-sbc.sf = 1276	offset-partition = 178680	size-of= fragment = 5

Have a look at the last fragment here: last 5 mb fragment of the sbc-files is located 174 GBs into the volume.

How can a regular vSphere user figure out these values ?