asked on

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

coolsport00

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

Danny McDaniel

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.

bgoering

You have what is known as orphaned vms - there is a kb article that addresses that: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=1351&sliceId=1&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&dialogID=7216361&stateId=1

Good Luck

GraemeTL

ASKER

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.

Danny McDaniel

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.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

bgoering

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

GraemeTL

ASKER

Apologies for the delay in accepting the response