VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) is the high-performance cluster file system used by VMware vSphere for storing virtual machines. While VMFS is robust, it is not immune to corruption. Unexpected power failures, storage latency, improper VMFS upgrades, or underlying LUN issues can lead to metadata inconsistencies, missing VMs, or an inaccessible datastore.
The primary mechanism for repairing a corrupted VMFS datastore is the vmkfstools command-line utility, specifically using the recover mode. vmfs repair tool
: Primarily used to manage virtual disks, it features a -x flag specifically for checking ( -x check ) and repairing ( -x repair ) corrupted VMDK files. VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) is the
Identifies common VMFS issues: