Hopefully you never have to work with a VM that blocks all operations and reports I/O errors.
Having such a problem on a datastore with activ production-VMs can be a really pain - solving it with ESXi buildin-tools may appear impossible.
In some easy cases using Linux to extract such a vmdk may work - but often that also fails.
If you ever run into a problem like this dont give up to early.
Last weekend I tried a quite obscure procedure to recover a domain-controller VM with one 80gb thick/unfragmented vmdk and another 512gb/85 fragments thick vmdk.
ESXi-tools all reported I/O errors so the customer already expected a complete loss.
But after two days I could present a completely healthy VM that did not even need a checkdisk on first start after the recovery.
It is a bit to early to assume this will work in similar cases - but at least I now have an idea how to handle such a problem.
If you run into a problem like that and run out of options - let me have a look - maybe I can help.
Ulli
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Do you need support with a VMFS recovery problem ? - send a message via skype "sanbarrow"
I do not support Workstation 16 at this time ...
