Restore Vmware From Delta Vmdk ✦ Plus & Direct

She couldn’t skip it. The VM would boot but corrupt data silently.

She used vmkfstools -D to inspect each delta. The deepest child ( FinServe-07-000014.vmdk ) had a valid descriptor but the parent CID didn’t match any actual parent. A typical "broken chain" from a storage migration gone wrong months ago.

At 6:00 AM, the clone finished. She attached the new VMDK to a test VM. It booted. FSck was clean. She mounted the DB—all transactions present. restore vmware from delta vmdk

Here’s an interesting story about a VMware restoration from a delta VMDK, blending real-world system administration tension with a touch of the unexpected. The Ghost in the Delta

# Inside FinServe-07-000014.vmdk descriptor: RW 83886080 VMFS "FinServe-07-000014-delta.vmdk" parentFileNameHint="FinServe-07-000013.vmdk" Instead of committing (which would try to write 2.3 TB to the base and likely fail due to space), she used vmkfstools -i to clone the entire chain into a new, consolidated thin VMDK while the VM was off . This forces VMware to read every delta in order and write a fresh, clean VMDK. She couldn’t skip it

She did something risky: manually edited the descriptor file of delta 14, pointing its parentFileNameHint to the actual CID of delta 13’s extent.

She had to restore from the delta —not the base. The deepest child ( FinServe-07-000014

At 3:30 AM, the clone stalled at 42%. She checked the storage logs—silent corruption in delta 09. The block containing a purchase order table’s metadata was unreadable.