Before we dive into the recovery process, it's essential to understand the common causes of VMFS 6 datastore loss:
Recovering a VMFS 6 datastore requires identifying whether the issue is a simple "unmounted" state or a deeper partition/metadata corruption. For a successful recovery, you generally follow a tiered approach from non-destructive rescanning to advanced third-party software extraction. 1. Initial Diagnosis and Rescan Before using specialized tools, check if the ESXi host can see the storage device and simply needs to refresh its inventory. Rescan Storage recover vmfs 6 datastore
ls /mnt/vmfs
If you want to rebuild the VMFS 6 datastore, you can use the vmfs-tools package to create a new datastore: Before we dive into the recovery process, it's
For accidentally deleted datastores where the partition table is gone but data remains, advanced users can use partedUtil to get the partition table and vmkfstools to attempt to recreate the VMFS filesystem. Initial Diagnosis and Rescan Before using specialized tools,