Before attempting any recovery, it is critical to understand what makes VMFS unique. Unlike standard file systems such as NTFS or ext4, VMFS is a clustered file system designed for concurrent access by multiple ESXi hosts. It uses a complex metadata structure, including a heartbeat region, file descriptors (FDCs), and a pointer block system. Corruption often occurs in:
If a VMFS partition becomes inaccessible (e.g., datastore not visible in vSphere, missing files, I/O errors): vmfs partition recovery