Recover — Vmfs Metadata

Expected output from vmfs-fs-probe if metadata intact:

Introduction VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) is the backbone of vSphere environments, designed for high-performance concurrent access by multiple ESXi hosts. Despite its robustness, VMFS is not immune to corruption. Among the most dreaded scenarios for a storage administrator is the loss or corruption of VMFS metadata—the critical set of structures that tells the hypervisor where files (virtual disks, configurations, snapshots) reside on the underlying LUN or disk device. recover vmfs metadata

esxcfg-volume -l # List snapshot volumes esxcfg-volume -r <vol_name> # Resignature (keeps data) VMFS6 stores redundant copies of critical metadata structures. You can manually copy a backup superblock: esxcfg-volume -l # List snapshot volumes esxcfg-volume -r

# Unmount if mounted vmkfstools -V /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.6000...:1 # Remount to replay journal esxcfg-volume -M <datastore_name> If corruption is due to ESXi detecting a duplicate UUID, resignaturing preserves metadata but changes datastore identity: Use dd and hdparm to check if basic

VMFS version: 6.81 Volume UUID: 4a5b3c2d-... Number of heartbeats: 3 If it fails with No VMFS filesystem found , metadata is corrupt or missing. Use dd and hdparm to check if basic partition table is readable: