Vmdk - Deleted

“Alex… did you just do something? The main customer database just went offline. Like, the entire CRM.”

He logs into the vSphere client. He sees the VM folder. He sees the files: .vmx (config), .vmdk (the disk), and .flat.vmdk (the raw data). He thinks: “I don’t need the whole VM, just the disk file.”

Two seconds later, his phone rings. It’s the on-call developer. deleted vmdk

Alex doesn’t panic (much). He remembers a rule his mentor taught him:

He looks back at the datastore browser. In his exhaustion, he’d been in the wrong folder. He hadn’t deleted the old dev disk. He’d deleted the production CRM’s primary .vmdk file while the VM was still running. “Alex… did you just do something

It’s 11:30 PM on a Friday. Alex is doing routine storage cleanup on the company’s VMware ESXi host. They have a legacy virtual machine named “Dev-Web-01” that was decommissioned months ago. He’s been asked to free up space on the datastore.

Alex, a junior sysadmin for a mid-sized company. He’s competent but works under constant pressure. His greatest unspoken fear is breaking something irreplaceable. He sees the VM folder

The Midnight Click