INSPECTION AND REPAIR OF OBJECT METADATA IN VIRTUAL STORAGE AREA NETWORKS

Systems and methods for inspection and repair of VSAN object metadata. A user-space indirection layer is maintained to map logical addresses of VSAN objects to physical memory addresses of their metadata. Commands may then be sent from the user space to distributed object manager (DOM) clients, with the physical addresses of metadata of objects to be inspected. DOM owners thus may bypass their own indirection layers to retrieve object metadata directly from received user commands. Retrieved information is then used to reconstruct and repair object metadata. Repaired metadata may be written back to the VSAN by transmitting a write request containing the physical address at which the repaired metadata is to be written. DOM owners may be placed in a specified mode in which received I/O instructions are ignored unless they are designated as being for metadata repair purposes, such as by including a physical address.