Recover Vmfs Metadata May 2026

Introduction VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) is the backbone of vSphere environments, designed for high-performance concurrent access by multiple ESXi hosts. Despite its robustness, VMFS is not immune to corruption. Among the most dreaded scenarios for a storage administrator is the loss or corruption of VMFS metadata—the critical set of structures that tells the hypervisor where files (virtual disks, configurations, snapshots) reside on the underlying LUN or disk device.

# Find backup superblock locations (example for VMFS6) # Primary at LBA 1, backup at LBA 2048, 4096, etc. dd if=/vmfs/devices/disks/naa.6000... of=/tmp/backup_superblock bs=512 count=1 skip=2048 # Restore primary dd if=/tmp/backup_superblock of=/vmfs/devices/disks/naa.6000... bs=512 count=1 seek=1 Incorrect offsets can destroy data. Only attempt if you have exact documentation for your VMFS version. 3.3 Third-Party Recovery Tools (Recommended for Critical Data) Several commercial tools specialize in VMFS metadata reconstruction. They work by scanning the raw device for file signatures and rebuilding the allocation map. recover vmfs metadata

Expected output from vmfs-fs-probe if metadata intact: Introduction VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) is

VMFS version: 6.81 Volume UUID: 4a5b3c2d-... Number of heartbeats: 3 If it fails with No VMFS filesystem found , metadata is corrupt or missing. Use dd and hdparm to check if basic partition table is readable: # Find backup superblock locations (example for VMFS6)