Although I have seen a few threads referencing the message... "The specified key, name, or identifier already exists." I have found a different scenario that generates this error. We had several clone tasks running, unfortunately, we also had an odd storage problem, such that all the cloned tasks aborted. Once we corrected the storage issue, and had everything working, we can not clone to the same VM names that were in process when the original storage issue happened. Say we had VM1, VM2, VM3, VM4 in the middle of being cloned as VM5, VM6, VM7, VM8. Now, after this scenario, I can clone VM1,2,3,4 as VM11,12,13,14 etc. But if I try to recreate the clone tasks where VM1,2,3,4 will be cloned to VM5,6,7,8... these reused names all abort with the error as noted in the subject line. We have tried to clone on different hosts, but always using the same VC server. Anyone have any similar experience. Please note, this issue is NOT a VMotion issue. In fact, if I try to create a VM5,6,7 or 8 as a new VM from scratch, I get the error as well. This implies that the VM names are being referenced somewhere OTHER than the ESX host being used? Could we have some junk in the VC database?
