1. Introduction VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) is a high-performance clustered file system designed for storing virtual machine disks (VMDKs), configuration files, and snapshots. Despite its robustness, VMFS volumes can become corrupted due to abrupt power loss, improper VMFS upgrades, faulty storage hardware, accidental formatting, or metadata corruption.
dcfldd if=/dev/sdX of=vmfs_disk.dd hash=sha256 hashlog=hash.txt bs=1M conv=noerror,sync # Or using ddrescue for failing drives ddrescue -f /dev/sdX vmfs_disk.dd vmfs_mapfile Commercial tools are often the fastest path: vmfs recovery
# Check VMDK descriptor consistency vmkfstools -Q recovered_vm.vmdk dd if=recovered_flat.vmdk bs=1M count=1 | hexdump -C Attempt to mount or clone vmkfstools -i recovered_flat.vmdk -d thin verified.vmdk dcfldd if=/dev/sdX of=vmfs_disk
vmfs-fuse -o ro /dev/loop0 /mnt/recovery If that fails, carve small files by known headers ( #! for VMX, KDMV for VMDK descriptor). Situation : An administrator ran vmkfstools -C vmfs5 /dev/disks/... on a datastore containing 12 production VMs. on a datastore containing 12 production VMs
| Tool | Best for | |------|----------| | | VMFS3/5/6, deleted VMDKs, RAID reconstruction | | R‑Studio | VMFS datastores with partition table loss | | SysTools VMFS Recovery | Simple file extraction from healthy metadata | | vmfs-tools (open source) | Manual CLI recovery, limited to clean FS |