What hapens to the structure of the system storage when I update my ESXi hosts to vSphere 7?

The requirements to ESXi system storage are also applicable to ESXi updates (6.x > 7). However, the requirements to the boot media for a new installation of vSphere 7 and an update to vSphere 7 are different. When updating to vSphere 7, the boot media is required to work with a storage device of at least 4 GB. It is strongly recommended to comply with the requirements to the boot media for a new installation of vSphere 7.

What other media is supported for ESXi storage?

For ESXi 7.0, a boot disk of at least 32 GB is recommended. For example, a hard disk, a solid-state drive or an NVMe drive. Use USB flash drives and SD cards only for ESXi boot bank partitions. The boot media should not be shared by ESXi hosts.

What recommendations are there for ESXi system storage?

Recommended installation options for ESXi 7.0: A hard disk of at least 32 GB. The disk contains boot partitions and ESX-OSData partition. A hard disk of at least 138 GB or more. The disk contains boot partitions and ESX-OSData partition. A hard disk of at least 142 GB or more. The disk contains boot partitions, ESX-OSData partition, and a VMFS data store.

It is not recommended to use obsolete SD or USB media. Obsolete SD or USB media are supported but with some limitations. You should provide an additional VMFS volume of at least 32 GB to store the ESX-OSData partition, and a VMFS data store. If the boot media capacity exceeds 138 GB, the ESXi installer creates a VMFS volume automatically. Remove VMFS data store on USB and SD media immediately after the installation to avoid data damage.

The VMFS-L Locker partition on ESXi host is corrupted. What should I do?

Most likely, this results from using low endurance devices such as SD cards or USB drives for ESXi hosts. The most common reasons for frequent read operations that wear these out are VMTools files accessed by virtual machines. Typical symptoms include interruptions in reading data when adjacent flash memory cells are contacted in the course of read operations. It means that even if you perform read operations for one sector, this may affect other sectors which could not be accessed on this flash memory device, and metadata sectors of the file systems may get damaged or corrupted.

How to Recover Data from VMFS Partitions of an VMware vSphere ESXi Virtual Machine

In this article, we’ll discuss installation of a VMW ESXi hypervisor to an HP ProLiant DL380p server. Also, we will explore how to recover data from a virtual machine of the VM hypervisor and from partitions with the VMFS file system.

Contents

The hypervisor lets you virtualize servers to manage various IT infrastructure, so it allows you to consolidate applications while saving time and resources. In this article, we’re going to cover vSphere ESXi hypervisor by VMWare. The basic package of VMware vSphere includes two main components – ESXi and vCenter Server. We are going to explore in detail the installation of ESXi 7 to a server.

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⚙️How to Recover Data from VMFS Partitions of a VMware vSphere ESXI Virtual Machine⚙️

VMWare ESXi is a hypervisor that can be installed onto a physical server and lets you run several operating systems on a single host computer. These operating systems work separately from each other but they may interact within a network.

There are both free and commercial versions of VMware ESXi. The functionality of the free version is somewhat limited. It lets you consolidate a limited number of operating systems on one computer, and it cannot be managed with the central server, the vCenter. Nevertheless, the free version of the hypervisor can easily connect to remote storage where you can create, store and use virtual machines.

How to install VMWare ESXi

The first step to take before you can install ESXi is to download the installation image from the official VMWare website. To get a download link for the free version of the hypervisor, you need to sign up. The trial period is 60 days long which gives you enough time to get acquainted with this tool.

Downloading software from the VMware official website

When the image is downloaded, you should record it to a pen drive or disk. To create a bootable drive, you can use any tool available that supports this feature – for example, Rufus.

As soon as the bootable drive is ready, you can begin the installation. We’re going to install ESXI 7 to the server HP ProLiant DL380p without the operating system.

Boot with the bootable pen drive or disk. Select the installation device and press Enter to start the installation.

After that, you will see the ESXI installer loading. Brief system information about the server will appear on the screen, and then components will initialize and boot.

A brief system information about the server will appear on the screen, and then components will initialize and boot

In the end, you will see the ESXI installer welcome screen, so press Enter to continue, or Esc to cancel the operation.

After that, accept the license agreement by pressing the F11 key, and then storage devices available for installation will be scanned.

The program has found the disk, so hit Enter to continue and install the software there. In my case, the installer displays a warning that the central processor in this host may not be supported in future ESXI versions; hit Enter to continue.

In the keyboard settings, don’t change anything, and leave the options as they are – US Default – and press Enter to accept.

After that, the installer will suggest setting a root password that you will use to enter the ESXi management console. Type the password, confirm it, and hit Enter to continue.

The installer suggests setting a root password

Now the installer asks you to confirm the installation: press the F11 key to start this operation.

After the installation, you’ll be asked to remove the installation media and then reboot – so hit the Enter key to do it. This is the last step of the installation process, and now you have to wait until the server reboots.

Now the system is up and running; above, you can see a brief overview of the server characteristics, and below, the IP address which you can use to connect to the server via the network. It can be modified in the settings, if necessary.

You can access them by pressing the F2 key, and typing the login and root password.

Here are the options you can access through the settings menu: modify the password, configure the network, restart the network manager, configure keyboard, view system logs, access the console; below, you have the option to reset the system configuration to default values. After the configuration is complete, you’ll be able to connect to this server from another computer in this network.

Open the browser and type the server’s IP address. Agree to deal with an untrusted certificate. On the page that opens, give the user name and password for the root account that you specified during the ESXi installation. Click “Log in.”

Give the root user name and password for ESXI

Here, you can see the ESXi version and its state: not connected to any VCenter Server. The next step is to create and configure a virtual machine. The system has detected the storage, identified the drive type and provisioned some space for virtual machines. You can check the network settings as well.

How to create a virtual machine

Open the Navigator and go to the tab “Virtual Machines.”

In the right-side window, click Create/Register VM and select one of the items to create a new virtual machine.

At the next stage, give a name to the future machine, select the family of its operating system and the version, then click “Next.” Select the storage and click “Next” again.

In the Virtual Hardware tab, specify the settings for the new virtual machine. The number of processors and the amount of RAM to be allocated for the machine. Also, don’t forget to allocate some disk space.

The number of processors and amount of RAM to be allocated

In the CD / DVD Drive settings, select the disk type as Datastore ISO File, and a new window opens to let you choose the file.

At this stage, remember to check the box for the option “Connect at power on”, otherwise, the system will refuse to boot from the disk.

In the window that opens, look at the top left corner, click “Upload” and give the path to the ISO image of the operating system that you have downloaded in advance; click “Open” and wait until the image is ready. After that, highlight it and click “Select” – “Next.” Now check all the properties and click “Finish” – the new machine will appear on the list.

Open the ISO image of the operating system

The only thing left to do is to start it and install the operating system. Select the virtual machine and click “Power on.” To run it from the virtual disk drive, press any key.

The actual process of installing an operating system to a virtual machine is the same as if you were installing it to your computer, so just follow the wizard directions.

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How to recover data from a virtual machine

How to recover data from a virtual machine created with ESXi VM visor.

As we know, files of virtual machines managed by ESXi hypervisor are stored on the disk, in volumes having the VMFS file system. The biggest problem is that when an ESXi host breaks down, there is no way to retrieve the information stored on its disks – unless you use some specialized software. The matter is that classic Windows and Linux operating systems cannot recognize volumes or partitions with the VMFS file system. At the moment, such a data recovery tool as Hetman Partition Recovery doesn’t support VMFS, but you can still use the program to scan the disk with this file system and extract the information.

Partition Recovery™ 4.9

The tool recovers data from any devices, regardless of the cause of data loss.

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If you accidentally removed some important data inside the virtual machine, just install our program, run it, and scan the drive where you used to store the accidentally removed files. The program will find the files, and you’ll be able to recover them.

Select the disk to recover lost data from, right-click on it and choose Open.

Select the scan type, click “Next,” and then wait until the process is over. After that, go to the directory containing the deleted files; you can see the program has found them easily, and now they are marked with a red cross.

Select the files you want to restore and click “Recovery.” Choose the path where to save them and click “Recovery” again. When the entire process is over, you will find the recovered files in the folder you have chosen.

How to recover data from the host server disk

When the operating system on the server is damaged, or the host suffers from a critical error, data recovery gets a bit more complicated, because you can’t just connect a disk to another computer and extract all the data you need. When running with the NTFS scan option, Hetman Partition Recovery find data in VMFS partitions of the drive. As a result, you’ll be able to get the virtual machine data from the drive.

Start the program, select the partition where virtual machine files are stored, and run the analysis: the fast scan option is not available in this case.

Select the partition where virtual machine files are stored, and run the scan

Select “Full analysis,” specify the file system of the virtual machine disk – in my case, this is NTFS on Windows, and click “Next.”

As you can see, the program managed to find the virtual machine partition with Windows and the NTFS file system, which is located in the volume having the VMFS file system.

The program managed to find the virtual machine partition with Windows OS

Open the detected partition to find out that the utility is displaying all the files, even those that have been deleted (they are marked with a red cross).

Select the files you want to recover and click “Recovery,” select where you want to save them. When the process is over, you will find the recovered files in the folder you have selected.