The datastore reappeared in the vSphere Client. VMs showed as "unknown"—expected. She browsed the datastore: all VM folders, .vmdk , .vmx files intact.
Maya grabbed coffee and her battle-tested Linux VM with vmfs-tools compiled. First rule of VMFS recovery: do not write anything to the affected LUN . She used a rescue Linux live CD on a physical host with HBA access. recover vmfs datastore
She logged in. Heart sank. The 12-TB VMFS volume—hosting a real-time fraud detection system—wasn’t just offline. It was gone. ls -la /vmfs/volumes/ showed only the local datastore. Someone (an intern following an outdated runbook) had accidentally zapped the LUN mapping from the SAN side, then re-presented it—but as a new device signature. The datastore reappeared in the vSphere Client
Step 2: Use vmfs-fuse to try a read-only mount. # vmfs-fuse /dev/sde1 /mnt/recover → failed: "Unsupported VMFS version or corrupted heartbeat region" . Maya grabbed coffee and her battle-tested Linux VM
Success: Found backup VMFS6 superblock at 0x20000000 .
Maya stared at the now-green dashboard. Somewhere in the datacenter, a disk blinked its steady heartbeat. She smiled. Another VMFS ghost story, beaten by knowing exactly where VMware hides its backup superblocks.
It was 2:00 AM on a Tuesday—the universal witching hour for IT disasters. Maya, a senior storage administrator, was jolted awake not by her pager, but by the eerie silence of her monitoring dashboard going dark. Then the texts came: “ESXi hosts lost connectivity to datastore ‘Prod-HighSpeed’.”