Can a VM or vmdk be recovered when VMFS metadata is overwritten?

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• The metadata of a VMFS datastore has been overwritten.

 

• When running VOMA, critical filesystem markers are not found:
  
  

voma -m vmfs -f check -d /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 

Running VMFS Checker version 2.1 in check mode
Initializing LVM metadata, Basic Checks will be done

Initializing LVM metadata..-

LVM magic not found at expected Offset,

It might take long time to search in rest of the disk.

VMware ESXi Question:

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• A VM or vmdk needs to be recovered. How to find the beginning of a vmdk or VM file on the datastore?

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0
VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Resolution

Data for any file on a VMFS datastore is distributed across the datastore. The blocks that comprise a file can only be identified from the VMFS metadata. 

Specialist data recovery providers may be able to reconstruct overwritten metadata and recover access to a file, if the relevant metadata but not the file data has been overwritten.  See Data recovery services for data not recoverable by VMware Technical Support  

Additional Information

Using vSphere On-disk Metadata Analyzer (VOMA) to check VMFS metadata consistency

VMware vSphere VMFS