what is bare minimum needed to recover VM, would .vmdks's be enough?

[beerorkid]

uber critical disaster recovery going on.

We have a data recovery company working on a borked datastore and they are able to see the data and can recover files.

They are charging a per file fee to do the recovery, we have 60 VM's we want to recover. One .vmdk counts as a single file.

What is the bare minimum we would need to be able to restore a VM?

We figure we will need the servername.vmdk and the servername-flat.vmdk.

we can recreate the .vmx

any info would be appreciated. I was searching but not having much luck.

and I would highly recommend ESS data recovery to anyone. Their SAN guy is top notch.

[waynegrow]

That would be all you would need.

[Dave_Mishchenko · Accepted solution]

The servername.vmdk and -flat.vmdk is the bare minimum you would need. You could then create a new VM and link to the existing VMDK.

You could also recreate the servername.vmdk file if necessary. There a thread on this from a few days ago on the forums.

[oreeh]

You at least need the VMDKs.

The VMX files would help alot, otherwise you'll have to memorize which VMDK belonged to which VM and what other parameters (guest OS, amount of memory, ...) were used / are needed for the VMs.

[beerorkid]

Thanks so much for the quick replies.

Prob do not have to tell you the urgency to figure that out.

Been surviving on vending machine food for the past two days.