The business services were back online within a few hours, and the company breathed a collective sigh of relief. John had successfully recovered the VMFS volume, saving the business from potential losses due to downtime.
| Tool | Platform | Notes | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | | Windows/Linux/macOS | Excellent VMFS parser. Can recover individual VMDKs. | | UFS Explorer Professional | Windows/Linux | Supports VMFS5/6, RAID reconstruction. | | DiskInternals VMFS Recovery | Windows | Simple wizard-based recovery. | | vSphere Data Recovery (Free) | VMware | Deprecated, but still works for old environments. | recover vmfs volume
In the vSphere Client, perform a Rescan Storage operation on your ESXi hosts. The business services were back online within a
Before attempting to recover a lost VMFS volume: Can recover individual VMDKs
If the ESXi host cannot see the volume even after partition repairs, the VMFS metadata may be severely corrupted. In these instances, host-based tools are often insufficient.