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Software-Defined Storage and HCI Data Recovery

In software-defined and hyperconverged environments there is no array to recover — the storage layer is software running across a cluster of servers, and the data for any one virtual machine is spread across many hosts. That changes what has to be preserved: not a set of disks from one chassis, but the drives and topology of the whole cluster.

VMware vSAN and Nutanix dominate this category in enterprise environments. Both distribute data as objects or extents across nodes with policy-driven replication or erasure coding, and both keep distributed metadata that maps those pieces back into usable virtual disks. Losing metadata quorum can make an entire cluster unreadable while every drive remains physically healthy.

The most damaging actions after a cluster failure are almost always administrative rather than physical: rebuilding a cluster, recreating disk groups or storage pools, re-imaging hosts, or removing nodes before a resync completes. Each of those can overwrite the structures a recovery depends on.

Recovery work involves imaging drives from every contributing node, reconstructing the distributed layout, reassembling virtual disks, and then extracting the guest file systems, databases, shares or objects inside them.

Ceph, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and other software-defined platforms are handled through the same enterprise evaluation process; they are covered by the general enterprise intake rather than by a dedicated page at this time.

Software-Defined Storage & HCI Platforms

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