Lesson Learned

After not eating lunch today and doing some quick configurations withing vCenter, I accidentally deleted a vDisk off of the wrong VM. Not good. Sure enough, when logging into the ESX host, the vDisk was gone, unrecoverable. I recall VMWare ESX 3.5 had a utility named vmfs-undelete for the purpose of recovering deleted vmdk files. No longer:

vmfs-undelete utility is not available for ESX/ESXi 4.0
ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 3 included a utility called vmfs-undelete, which could be used to recover deleted .vmdk files. This utility is not available with ESX/ESXi 4.0.

Workaround: None. Deleted .vmdk files cannot be recovered.

[VMware ESX 4.0 Update 1 Release Notes]

Fortunately the data on the vDisk can be recreated by the developer in about an hour, so all told we're not set back too far. An important lesson learned though:

1. Always double check before permanently deleting
2. Don't have multiple configuration windows open at the same time
3. Eat lunch