Hi, this looks like a helpful community, so I thought I would get some input on a situation I walked into.
Here's the story. This school has three ESXi 4 host machines all sharing drive space via NFS to a Slackware 14 box. The Slackware box has a raid10 with 4x2TB drives for 4TB of total space. I receive a call a few weeks ago that all the guests machines went down (all run either Windows Server 2003/2008) due to an error about the data store being full. So, I go over and indeed the Slackware Raid was full and the guest that takes all the space had 50 snapshots in it, three of which were missing (APOC-000015-delta.vmdk, 31 and 32). I believe someone removed them because I came back after a while, and the raid wasnt full anymore. This allowed all the other guests to start except of course the one missing three delta files. The cause for all the snapshots was Veeam as we found out, it would start and then lose network connectivity after so long (at least that was what the Veeam logs indicated). So, as this is an important file server with essentially no backup and missing snapshots, I started looking at file recovery software and came across testdisk/photorec. I started the process and it took three days, but it *looks* like it retrieved the correct file sizes for the three delta files when compared to what they were before they were deleted. We were able to gain more disk space by removing an old guest machine no one was using anymore to make room for me to put the recovered files back in place. So, I did that and renamed them according to what I thought they were. Now, I am receiving the error 'Cannot open the disk /vmfs/volumes/59b1ea0e-4f76f242/APOC/APOC-000050.vmdk or one of the snapshot disks it depends on. Reason: No such device or address.' The log shows it opens all 50 vmdk files successfully, although it's clear that doesn't seem to be the case. The line 'can't create deltadisk node...' is where I see it stops in the log, not sure what it means.
Apologies as I typed this out kind of fast, so I guess what I want to know if there is a way to tell if the -delta files I recovered are indeed valid (not corrupt) and if there's any steps I can take to resolve said error message above. Attached are the .vmx, .vmxf., .nvram and the latest vmware.log from the server folder.
Thanks for any insight on this, it's been a learning experience for everyone.