A couple of months ago Mike La Spina wrote a cool article titled “Understanding VMFS volumes“. This articles explained the concept of UUID’s and even explained how you could create a backup of your VMFS metadata. I haven’t personally ever encountered VMFS metadata corruption but it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Today Mike wrote a follow up which contains a script that can backup your metadata on a regular base by using cron. The script does a DD of each VMFS volume header and copies the vh.sf file of the VMFS volume to local disk. If you haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about I suggest Head over to Mike’s blog and read the articles!
It can’t be a coincidence that the script has been released shortly after VMware released the VMware VMFS Volume Management PDF… And is it a coincidence that Eric Sloof wrote about VMFS metadate files yesterday? Eric’s also posted a link to Mostafa Khalil’s VMworld 2007 presentation on VMFS volumes and how to backup metadata by the way.
All very useful documents/articles if you want to know the ins and out of the VMFS filesystem.
anlysis vmfs filesystem struct
recovery the lost file from vmfs.
Hi,
is somebody having an equivalent procedure to backup/restore vmfs parition table on ESX 4 and or 5 ?
Thanks