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Protecting VMFS Datastores

Duncan Epping · Mar 29, 2009 ·

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.

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Management & Automation, Server ESX, Storage, vmfs

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Comments

  1. chunleili says

    18 May, 2011 at 09:27

    anlysis vmfs filesystem struct
    recovery the lost file from vmfs.

  2. Vistualizator says

    22 March, 2012 at 15:31

    Hi,

    is somebody having an equivalent procedure to backup/restore vmfs parition table on ESX 4 and or 5 ?

    Thanks

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About the author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist in the Office of CTO of the Cloud Platform BU at VMware. He is a VCDX (# 007), the author of the "vSAN Deep Dive", the “vSphere Clustering Technical Deep Dive” series, and the host of the "Unexplored Territory" podcast.

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