Where is my data??

[frenchyaz]

Hello,

I have a test bed with ESX5 and Starwind 5.7.1733 Free Edition. I have one 2TB iSCSI target setup with VMFS5. My ESX server crashed and I restarted it. It lost the connection to the iSCSI server (Windows 2008 R2 Standard). When reconnecting the volume, the ESX server states that the hard disk is blank and wants to format the disk. I'm not sure what happened there but it seems like all my data is gone. How can I get it back, if possible?

Let me know.

So far I tried the following:
Unplug and Replug the drive from Starwind: unsuccessful
Mounted the disk to Windows to try to recover the data: unsuccessful as VMFS5 is using homebrewed GPT partition

I am a bit worried of this kind of issue has usually when a crash occur I don't lose anything.

Of course, it is a testbed and I can recreate the VMs inside but I would like to know what happened and if there is a way to fix it.

Thanks in advance.

[anton (staff)]

1) You're not using version of StarWind being up-to-date. No data loss should happen to 5.7 (of course) but it's not recommended to use anything listed as active on our site.

2) What type of device did you create? RAW image? Deduplicated device?

3) What type of caching did you use? Write-back? Write-throu? No cache?

[frenchyaz]

I've been using Starwind 5.7 for a while with no issues as the 5.8 wasn't released yet. Not sure wht you mean by not up to date? Also what does that mean listed as active? Sorry if I missed something but I just started this thread so that is why it is active... I guess?

Nonetheless, the device was a basic disk one with write back caching 1024MB, nothing unreasonable I believe.

Let me know if it helps adn thanks for your reply.

[anton (staff)]

You cannot run write back cache if you have only one storage node and / or only one hypervisor node. See this thread:

starwind-f5/automatic-device-synchronization-after-the-both-nodes-t2670.html

In a nutshell: either storage or hypervisor head crashed will result a lot of transactions lost.

I've been using Starwind 5.7 for a while with no issues as the 5.8 wasn't released yet. Not sure wht you mean by not up to date? Also what does that mean listed as active? Sorry if I missed something but I just started this thread so that is why it is active... I guess?

Nonetheless, the device was a basic disk one with write back caching 1024MB, nothing unreasonable I believe.

Let me know if it helps adn thanks for your reply.