I was helping a fellow VMware admin out this morning on a peculiar issue:
She had powered-off all of the VM's on an ESXi 5.0 Host, and then rebooted the host. When the host came back up, three (of about 20) VM's were marked as invalid. We investigated the datastore and found the VM folder contained only the *flat.vmdk and *.vmsd files!
We proceeded to recreate the disk descriptor files Recreating a missing virtual machine disk descriptor file (1002511) | VMware KB and then recreated the VM, adding the existing disk. Everything worked, but what could delete the entire VM registration including the disk descriptor?
I ran vm-support and looked at the log files, but I couldn't find anything and VMware support is just about useless these days. Any ideas?
THX,
-J
A powerfailure is the most trivial reason for the observed behaviour. Or rebooting forcefully when the shutdown takes too long.Filling up the datastore can also have similar results.
In some cases also an accidental delete from disk while the VM is still running can have this result.
You were lucky - the most important file is still there.
Very likely the vmx and original vmdk-descriptor is also still there - just invisble.
If you boot the host from a ESXi-USB-stick that has never seen permanent storage before sometimes everything may be still there.
Without seeing the datastore it is impossible to tell what exactly happened.
If it happens again - and you are interested - the chance to recover the original vmx and vmdk descriptorfile is quite good - it takes just a few minutes to do that via a remote-session.
Thanks for the response continuum!
I don't understand "invisible". If I am connected via ssh, can scan/rescan the datastore and run the command: ls -la, the file is either there or not there. It may be deleted and recoverable, but still.
I am also unclear how a fresh install of ESXI would make the missing files available? One thing I did not state earlier is the fact that this is a SAN LUN where the VM is stored.
Thanks,