Recovering from Missing VMDK Pointer Files
One of my customers recently had a fairly unique issue. It was unique enough that I thought that it would make an interesting write up, just in case anyone sees something similar in their own environment. We haven’t been able to track down root cause, but what ended up happening is all of the pointer VMDK files on a specific LUN were deleted. The –flat.vmdk files were still there, but none of the <VM>.vmdk files were present. This meant that no VM on that LUN could power on, as they were all throwing an error “File <unspecified filename> was not found”. That error message is slightly better than “An unspecified error occurred”, but only just barely. This customer is still on ESX 4.0 and, as you’d guess, they’re pretty far out of date as far as patches go. In addition, one of the fibre ports on their switch was flapping, causing some intermittent storage access issues. Neither of those facts sounds like a cause of the issue that...