Vmdk |work| — Deleted

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. deleted vmdk

Two seconds later, his phone rings. It’s the on-call developer. Alex doesn’t panic (much)

Alex’s blood turns to ice. He checks the running VMs. The production CRM server—the one that processes $50,000 in sales per hour—is named but without its disk descriptor file

The VM is still “running� in vCenter, but without its disk descriptor file, it can’t read any data. The operating system is frozen in a state of panic.