How do I access vmdk's from a foreign datastore

[RabanserD]

Hi,

I have tree ESXI hosts (1x 6.7, 2x 6.0), one 6.0 server died the other day,

now i need to get to the vmdk files on the disk (2x 300GB, 2x 64GB files), I tried to mount it in ubuntu which worked just fine,

however when i try to copy the larger vmdks with cp it gives me "cp: error reading '***_1-flat.vmdk' : Input/output error"

What would be the best solution to get to the vmdk files? Booting from the disk is not an option in my situation.

[nileshm]

Try and see if you could rebuild your 6.0 host that died. Boot with esxi 6.0 iso, while installation select option "Install ESXi, preserve VMFS datastore".

If you are not planning to rebuild and mounted disks in ubuntu, use WInscp to download vmdk files to some other location and then upload them to other datastores on your running host.

Thanks!

[continuum]

> I tried to mount it in ubuntu which worked just fine,
If you use "vmfs-fuse" from Ubuntu then you should know that this tool does not work for VMDKs larger than 256GB and it does not work at all with VMFS 6.

[RabanserD]

Thanks for the responses, rebuilding the host didn’t work out so well, and WInscp couldn't see the mounted partition.

Yes I did use vmfs-fuse (vmfs 5 datastore though), thanks for letting me know that it won’t work for files larger than 256gb.

I basically ended up creating a disk-disk clonezilla clone of the disk (and then booting from that & downloaded the files via the c# client)

[continuum · Accepted solution]

If you ever need a version of vmfs-fuse for vmdks larger than 256 GB you can use a Linux LiveCD that  I made
http://sanbarrow.com/livecds/moa64-nogui/MOA64-nogui-incl-src-111014-efi.iso
Boot it and log in as root - password is sanbarrow
Then do
sudo su
cd /
wget http://sanbarrow.com/files/sbin.tgz
tar zxf sbin.tgz
Now you can use
/standalone/sbin/vmfs-fuse
which can handle vmdks larger than 256GB