Accidentally deleted a VM -flat.vmdk file

[avitlana]

Hi everyone,

I just deleted a flat.vmdk file of a virtual machine through SSH.

I was actually about to recreate the descriptor vmdk file but deleted the flat one instead by accident. The funny thing is that I was doing it because no snapshots no Veeam backups could be run on the affected VM. So no I have no backups to fall back to I'm afraid, otherwise I would've just restored the entire VM.

The application that's hosted through the VM's IIS is still running fine though, haven't rebooted the machine yet or anything after having deleted the flat file.

Q: What should I do now that I don't have the flat.vmdk file anymore??

Thanks in advance

[maksym007]

Start to pray 🙂 

I just thought to write - what about Backup? Do you have maybe tapelibrary 

[avitlana]

I wish. Don't have a backup.

What happens next? Is the VM going to fail at some point? Anyway I can save it?

[a_p_]

That's kind of strange. ESXi usually prevents deleting files that are in use, like the flat file.
Can you confirm that it's really gone? Not renamed etc?

If it's indeed gone, an option would be to backup/copy files from within the guest OS to a another location.

André

[maksym007]

good point. If you have WinSCP - try to login to ESXi and navigate that Datastore with VM folder. Inside should be all these flat files visible. 

[sjesse]

If its truely gone, the associated guest harddrive should disappear, so if the guest os data is there while the machine is running the disk is somewhere

[avitlana]

I had to do a backup on application level I'm afraid. Couldn't resolve the backup issues