If the deleted VMDK was and the deletion did not trigger UNMAP, the blocks remain allocated but unreferenced.
In many enterprise environments, the "undelete" is performed not at the ESXi level, but at the storage array level. If the LUN has hardware-level snapshots, administrators can revert the entire volume to a state prior to the accidental deletion. Preventative Best Practices vmfs undelete esxi 6
Since undelete is unreliable, focus on prevention: If the deleted VMDK was and the deletion
A high-end professional tool that supports various VMFS versions and complex RAID configurations frequently used in enterprise ESXi deployments. Source Information Manual Recovery via Command Line Reddit·r/vmwarehttps://www.reddit.com Unlike general-purpose filesystems (NTFS
In this guide, we will walk through the process of undeleting files from a VMFS datastore on ESXi 6.
VMware’s Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) is a high-performance clustered filesystem designed for storing virtual machines. Unlike general-purpose filesystems (NTFS, ext4), VMFS does provide a native, user-accessible “Recycle Bin” or trivial undelete command. However, under specific conditions — primarily involving the absence of overwritten metadata and data blocks — deleted virtual machine files (VMDKs, VMX, logs) can be recovered.