Can a vm with thin disks read contents of a deleted vm in a datastore.

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Inquiry into whether the data from a vmdk deleted from disk can be added to a new vm.

Environment

ESXi 7.X and above

Cause

Virtual Machine had vmdk deleted from the datastore.

Unable to mount vmdk on new virtual machine.

Resolution

When you delete a VMDK file from a VMFS datastore:

• The file and its metadata are removed from the file system.
• The blocks on disk become free space, and there's no standard method for another VM to directly read those blocks.
• VMFS does not zero out the blocks, but they are no longer accessible through the file system.

 

Additional Information

It might be possible to recover deleted vmdk with the assistance of data recovery services.

Data recovery services for data not recoverable by VMware Technical Support