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Manually Remove Disconnected VM when Host Unavailable

Today we have had major problems with one of our clusters.  Thank fully at time of writing we have managed to restore most services. Howvever, we have a number of guest that have come disconnected.  Unfortunatley we cannot remove these from the inventory as they still have a status of powered on.  This is despite that actually physical host being powered down.  Does anyone know how we can change the status and remove and re-add to the inventory everything I have seen points to the physical host being available to fix such an issue.  Would appreciate anyone's wisdom.

Thanks

Graeme
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GraemeTL
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GraemeTL
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coolsport00Commented:
I assume you're logging into vCenter with vSphere Client? Do the VMs show as 'not connected' if you log onto the ESXi host directly? You can remove a powered-on VM from Inventory in vCenter and it would still be powered on, because VMs are actually on a host, not on vCenter. Remove from Inventory/then re-add one of your less critical VMs to test, but I'm pretty confident that is the case. Oh, and to re-add, you need to go into the VM's folder, right-click on its .vmx file and select Add to Inventory.

~coolsport00
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Danny McDanielClinical Systems AnalystCommented:
try restarting the management service on the hosts that these VM's are being reported as living on.  If they still persist, then restart the VC server service.
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bgoeringCommented:
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GraemeTLAuthor Commented:
Hi all.  The problem we have is that the host where the vms live is dead, therefore we cannot logon to the host to remove or change the guest status to powered off, to then remove the machine from inventory.  These guests are part of a large cluster but we cannot migrate or anything as the physical host won't boot.
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Danny McDanielClinical Systems AnalystCommented:
can you right-click on the dead host and choose 'disconnect'?  if you can do that, then you can right-click and remove host.  That will remove the VM's on it, too.  
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bgoeringCommented:
The first thing to do would be to remove the host from the cluster. I expect you should be able to do that - I believe it may ask do you want to uninstall the agent and you will say no because the host is dead. Removing the host would also remove the vms living on that host from inventory.

Next you would browse your datastores to each vm that was on the host in the datastore browser, right click the vmx file, and select add to inventory.

I did have to do that once a while back and I am pretty sure that was the process I followed.
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GraemeTLAuthor Commented:
Apologies for the delay in accepting the response
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