I had a customer call me yesterday about inadvertently deleting a vm from the command line within ESXi.
Luckily, for some reason (either the VM was still running or it had open files) the flat and delta vmdk files were not deleted.
Back then I was not sure if I could do anything to restore the VM, a bit of research on the Internet told me to recreate, in another folder a pointer.vmdk file of identitical geometry.
I moved the vmdk file and to the original folder with the corresponding -flat file and was able to clone the vmdk. So I new at least I could get the VM to the original file.
But the snapshot contained the bulk of the work.
I looked at the format of a snapshot pointer vmdk and copied it and simply changed the name and the parent CID.
I was able to use vmkfstools to clone the snapshot. Bingo!!!
Finally, the vm was NOT removed from Virtual Center so I was able to recreate a VM of same characteristics.
The only issue was the NIC, a new NIC was detected and the old NIC was hidden and latched on to the old IP address. Setting the show hidden devices flag and launching device manager allowed me to delete the hidden NIC.
All was well. It booted up.
Today I just did the bike and some weights. I decent workout, but I still saving my leg for the warrior dash Saturday.