The fix didn’t happen all at once. Dante staged the recovery: repair, verify, mount read-only, verify again, then finally commit. When he remounted the VMFS in read-write mode, the datastore flickered back into life and the VM’s services answered pings. The Windows host cooled as its processes settled. Around him, operators exhaled.
Enable read/write access to a volume from a Windows environment while the datastore remains online (“hot”) on a live VMware ESXi host. mount vmfs 6 windows hot
| Expectation | Reality | |-------------|---------| | Free native solution | None. Windows has no VMFS driver. | | Hot, writable mount | Possible only with expensive tools (e.g., UFS Explorer), but extremely risky if the volume is live on ESXi. | | Read-only hot mount | Yes, with tools like DiskInternals VMFS Recovery or OSFMount (partial v6 support). | | Safe production use | Detach the datastore from ESXi first, then mount as read-only on Windows. | The fix didn’t happen all at once
On the drive home Dante replayed the morning like a short story—mystery, tension, resolution—only the characters were paths and partitions, and the happy ending was a mounted VMFS-6 that served its VMs once more. The Windows host cooled as its processes settled