Copy VM files from ESXi host physical HDD

data-extractionvmware-esxi

My ESXi installation got corrupted (I get the Pink Screen of Death) and I would like to extract my VM info from the HDD. When I plug in into my Linux box I see 4 small partitions that does not have any VM info, and there is other 2 partitions that Linux does not recognize that are very big. Gparted listed them as 'Unknown' and fdisk says it doesn't recognize them either.

Is there a way to get the VM info from this HDD?

Thanks!

Best Answer

I ended up using the tutorial on: http://woshub.com/how-to-access-vmfs-datastore-from-linux-windows/

Thanks to @SmallLoanOf1M for pointing me on the right direction. At first 'fdisk' do not return the partition type because it was in GPT mode, and 'fdisk' does not work with those. And the command 'parted -l' does not returned the partition type of all of the ESXi hard drive.

I needed to install the package vmfs-tools:

apt-get install vmfs-tools

But since I was using ESXi 5.5 the vmfs-tools package was outdated and didnt had the support for VMFS 5, so I needed to install it manually:

wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/v/vmfs-tools/vmfs-tools_0.2.5-1_amd64.deb
dpkg -i vmfs-tools_0.2.5-1_amd64.deb

After that, to mount the HDD was as easy as:

mkdir /mnt/vm_hdd
vmfs-fuse /dev/sdb3 /mnt/vm_hdd
cd /mnt/vm_hdd

To read the virtual hdd inside the datastore I used 'guestmount'.

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