VMDK Recovery Tool available in ESX 3.5 Update 3
November 6th, 2008 | 
Author: New in the latest version of ESX 3.5 is an experimental Service Console script called the VMDK Recovery Tool. Since it’s Console based, it’s not available in ESXi. The Update 3 Release Notes say the following about it:
Experimental Support for the VMDK Recovery Tool — This release adds support for the VMDK Recovery tool, a script intended to help customers to recover VMFS/vmdk data stores from accidental deletion of VMFS/vmdk data store or physical disk corruption. For more information, see VMDK Recovery Tool (ESX 3.5 Update 3) ( KB 1007243).
KB 1007243 explains the script function as follows:
Use the VMDK Recovery Tool to:
Create a “block list” of your VMDK files. The block list file is a plain text file that keeps a record of all VMDKs of the virtual machines.
Recover VMDK files if they become deleted, or if the VMFS datastore gets deleted or corrupted.
Undelete VMDKs? Recover corrupted or deleted VMFS data stores? Reading KB 1007243 a little further reveals you can back up and restore VMs too – either specify which one you want to back up or pick all the registered VMs on the host. The script asks you to specify the directory path to use for saving backups and the destination path for restoring from backups.
Sounds to me like this script could become a “super VCB” without the extra server requirements? It seems much simpler anyways. It will be interesting to see how this script is developed and exactly how much disk space the block list and backup files consume.
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