Resignaturing VMFS
Copies
You can use
datastore resignaturing to retain the data stored on the VMFS datastore copy.
When resignaturing a VMFS copy,
the
ESXi
host
assigns a new UUID and a new label to the copy, and mounts the copy as a
datastore distinct from the original. Because
ESXi
prevents
you from resignaturing the mounted datastore, unmount the datastore before
resignaturing.
The default format of the new label assigned to the
datastore is
snap-<snapID>-<oldLabel>
, where
<snapID>
is an integer and <oldLabel>
is the
label of the original datastore. When you perform datastore
resignaturing, consider the following points.
- Datastore resignaturing is irreversible.
- The LUN copy that contains the VMFS datastore that you resignature is no longer treated as a LUN copy.
- A spanned datastore can be resignatured only if all its extents are online.
- The resignaturing process is crash and fault tolerant. If the process is interrupted, you can resume it later.
- You can mount the new VMFS datastore without a risk of its UUID conflicting with UUIDs of any other datastore, such as an ancestor or child in a hierarchy of LUN snapshots.