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.

You can resignature a VMFS copy with ESXCLI or with vicfg-volume. See Resignature a VMFS Copy with ESXCLI or Resignature a VMFS Copy with vicfg-volume.