Comments on: Understanding VMFS volumes

By: Mike La Spina

Mike La Spina — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 03:23:52 +0000

Hi Arno,

The LUN will be at the mercy of the Administrator, fdisk will be able to write to it and you will be able to overwrite any VMFS header that is exposed to the host in question.

Regards,

Mike

By: Arno

Arno — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 11:56:58 +0000

Hi Mike, thanks for the info, it’s great. I have a question about the distributed file system nature of VMFS. In a VI environment, do you know if when a LUN gets detected as a snapshot for any reason by a host, say with no VMs running on it, is there a security mechanism in VMFS which would prevent say fdisk being run or vmkfstools -C to create a new VMFS on it when that VMFS is being accessed by other ESX hosts which have running VMs on it?

By: Mike La Spina

Mike La Spina — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 19:33:17 +0000

Hi,

I’m sorry.
You can only restore from a backup or use vmfs-undelete and both methods require a proactive function prior to a delete call.
There are currently no tools that I am aware of which can recover the metadata and block allocation info after the security event occurs without some proactive steps prior to the incidents occurrence.

Regards,

Mike

By: Dai Nan

Dai Nan — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 16:01:14 +0000

Hi , I want to know is there anyway to restore vmdk file ? i delete the whole vm files using VC client , no vmdk-flat and nothing else, Is it possible to restore these files someway ? thank you very much