Practical VMFS signatures

VMFS is a pretty cool (if relatively undocumented) filesystem, and VMFS volumes were designed with one particular quirk that’s both a blessing and a curse — when you create the volume, ESX writes a few pieces of information to the disk signature on the volume that helps it identify the volume and figure out what to do with it. Each volume contains a UUID used to uniquely identify it when multiple volumes with the same name are presented, but each volume also registers one of three unique identifiers to the volume — the Network Addressing Authority (NAA) ID, an Extended … Continue Reading →