A client's server was not responding and attempts to re-boot failed. The client's IT support disassembled the virtual machine to prepare for launching a new server; however after one of the virtual storage volumes was forcibly detached and re-connected, Windows found the volume to be corrupt.

Virtual storage is the pooling of physical storage from multiple network storage devices into what appears to be a single storage device that is managed from a central console. The benefit of virtualization is that commodity hardware or less-expensive storage can be used to provide enterprise-class functionality. However if the need for data recovery arises, the ramifications can be far more serious - especially for internal virtual disk corruption. This is because the amount of data stored in a virtual environment is huge compared with a single server. Similarly there is a risk that the users continue to use the virtual host server datastore, risking overwriting valuable information.

This is exactly what had happened to our client. Thankfully they came to the right place, as Data Recovery Specialists engineers recognize the importance of virtualisation and have developed their own proprietary tools for recovering virtual servers. Given the tight timescales imposed on us by the client to rebuild the environment, our engineers worked 24:7 on this recovery. After a one hour diagnosis which identified the level of corruption, our engineers were able identify the data parameters and LUNs. This enabled them to start the long process of reconstructing the data.

Imagine a billion piece jigsaw with no picture to refer to - well that is what it is like rebuilding a virtual server! Thankfully our data recovery engineers were able to to rebuild the virtual server in less than 36 hours and deliver the data to a very happy client!