Restore | Vmware From Delta Vmdk

She had to restore from the delta —not the base.

# 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. restore vmware from delta vmdk

Maria’s manager whispered over the bridge line: “Just roll back to the snapshot. We lose a day, fine.” She had to restore from the delta —not the base

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. Maria’s manager whispered over the bridge line: “Just

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

The previous admin, Dave, had taken a “before-upgrade” snapshot over a year ago. Then he’d left. And no one ever committed or deleted it.

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.