VMware VMFS & Virtual Machine Recovery
Virtualisation puts many servers onto one set of storage, so a single datastore failure can take every virtual machine offline at once. We recover VMFS datastores and the VMDK files inside them, as well as Hyper-V and Proxmox environments.
Many organisations have been moving away from VMware since Broadcom’s licensing changes. Migrations between hypervisors are a common cause of data loss we see – if a migration has gone wrong, stop and call us before overwriting the source.
Platforms We Recover
| Platform | Details |
|---|---|
| VMware | ESXi / vSphere 5.5 to 9, VMFS 3/5/6, vSAN, VMware Workstation and Fusion, thin and thick VMDKs, snapshots and delta disks. |
| Microsoft Hyper-V | VHD and VHDX files, checkpoints (AVHDX), Cluster Shared Volumes, Storage Spaces Direct. |
| Proxmox VE | LVM-thin, ZFS and directory storage, qcow2 and raw disks, Ceph. |
| Others | Citrix Hypervisor / XenServer, Nutanix AHV, KVM/QEMU, VirtualBox. |
Common Failures
- Datastore missing or showing as unmounted after a SAN or RAID failure
- VMFS metadata or heartbeat corruption
- Deleted virtual machines or datastores
- Snapshot chains broken – VM will not power on or shows old data
- Thin-provisioned datastore full, causing VMs to crash
- Ransomware targeting ESXi hosts and encrypting VMDK files
- Failed migration from VMware to Hyper-V or Proxmox
Before You Do Anything
If your array has failed: do not force a rebuild, re-initialise the array, run CHKDSK/fsck, or swap drives between slots. Label every disk with its slot number, shut the system down cleanly if you can, and call us on 020 7064 4996. Most unrecoverable RAID cases we see were made worse by a rebuild attempted on the wrong disk.
Free assessment, no obligation. Call 020 7064 4996 or use the form on this page – an engineer will tell you what can be recovered and what it will cost. Book online · Pricing · Locations