In VC I renamed a datastore on the SAN. To do this I selected Inventory -> Datastores. I then right clicked on the datastore and selected rename, giving it a new name.

Well it seems that we could not read the datastore after that. Logging into the service console and listing the folders under the /vmfs partition displayed the "long name" (string of digits) and the alias name which matches what VC refers to. Well the alias name was in red which meant it was no longer "linked" to the long name (I think anyway). We then rebooted the ESX server and the "red" alias name disappeared.

My question is how do you get the alias name back ?

Thanks