Recovering a Deleted VMFS Datastore on VMware ESXi/vSphere

Let’s look at the issue when your VMFS datastore attached to an ESXi host/vSphere is deleted, lost, or damaged. It may happen, for example, due to a human error when a VMware administrator accidentally removes a VMFS datastore or a disk/LUN with a VMFS partition was disabled/lost due to errors on your storage/backup device. In this article, we’ll show how to manually recover the partition table on the disk with the VMFS datastore.

Suppose, a VMware administrator accidentally selected Delete instead of Unmount and removed a VMFS datastore.

Open the vCenter client interface, go to Storage -> Devices, and find in the list the disk/LUN with the VMFS datastore connected earlier. Get the full path to the disk (with the naa identifier). In my screenshot, it is:

/vmfs/devices/disks/naa.60003ff44dc75adc87daa4e08f467565

Enable SSH on your ESXi host on which the target LUN is available and connect to it using an SSH client (I am using the built-in Windows SSH client).

Make sure that the partition table exists on the device:

partedUtil getptbl /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.60003ff44dc75adc87daa4e08f467565
The command has returned that there is a GPT on the disk/LUN.

gpt
1305 255 63 20971520

Then you must get the first and the last block of the VMFS partition on the disk.

To display a summary of all partitions available from the ESXi host and find the first block of the deleted VMFS partition, run the script below in the ESXi cli:

offset="128 2048"; for dev in `esxcfg-scsidevs -l | grep "Console Device:" | awk {'print $3'}`; do disk=$dev; echo $disk; partedUtil getptbl $disk; { for i in `echo $offset`; do echo "Checking offset found at $i:"; hexdump -n4 -s $((0x100000+(512*$i))) $disk; hexdump -n4 -s $((0x1300000+(512*$i))) $disk; hexdump -C -n 128 -s $((0x130001d + (512*$i))) $disk; done; } | grep -B 1 -A 5 d00d; echo "---------------------"; done

In this example, we have displayed information about the deleted partition (testVMFS) and got the number of the first block of the partition: 2048.

Now we need to get the last block of the VMFS partition on the disk:

partedUtil getUsableSectors /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.60003ff44dc75adc87daa4e08f467565

In our example, it is 20971486.

Then get a partition table GUID for the VMFS partition. It is always AA31E02A400F11DB9590000C2911D1B8.

You can display all possible partition table GUIDs using this command:

partedUtil showGuids

So we have got the following information:

• LUN ID — naa.60003ff44dc75adc87daa4e08f467565
• Start Block – 2048
• End Block – 2097148
• GPT GUID – AA31E02A400F11DB9590000C2911D1B8

Then create a partition table on the disk using the information you have got:

partedUtil setptbl /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.60003ff44dc75adc87daa4e08f467565 gpt "1 2048 20971486 AA31E02A400F11DB9590000C2911D1B8 0"

Check the partitions on the disk again and make sure that the VMFS partition is now visible:

partedUtil getptbl /vmfs/devices/disks/naa.60003ff44dc75adc87daa4e08f467565

Now you need to mount the VMFS datastore:

vmkfstools -V
esxcli storage core adapter rescan --all

Go to the vSphere client and make sure that the accidentally deleted VMFS datastore appears. You can mount it on the VMware ESXi host or access it from a Linux or Windows host.

All files, including ISO images and virtual machine files, are available on the restored VMFS datastore.

This guide is relevant for VMware ESXi/vSphere 6.0, 6.5, and 7.0.