My issue has a rather detailed history, so please bear with me.
Durring a recent scheduled update of the VMware Tools on some VMs in my environment some odd issues came up. The update process failed and the snapshot remained on the VM. When I initially tried to delete the snapshot, I received an "task already in process" error. After reading several previous discussions, I found that shutting the VMs down allowed me to delete the snapshots on all but one without issue.
The one VM that had issue, had lots of them...
In order to shut these VMs down, I had to log into the guest OS and initiate the shutdown from there as whatever "state" the VM was in wouldn't allow for vCenter to initiate. As I said, I did this on several VMs without any incident prior to this last one. When I shutdown the guest OS on this one VM, vCenter failed to recognize that the VM powered down, and through the VM Console window showed "Waiting on connection."
Again, reading the communities, I logged into ESXi host through PowerCLI and checked the power state there. It showed the VM being powered off. The communities suggested that when this disjoint occurs a restart of the vCenter services should correct. Several restarts later, the problem persisted. I was able to power up the VM through the Start-VM command locally on the ESXi host, but if I tried to perform any actions through the vCenter server I received an error.
Finally, I came across a discussion that shared some simularity with my issue. It suggested that I remove the VM from inventory and then re-add it. However, to accomplish this in my situation I had to first remove the VM from the host's inventory before vCenter would allow me to even touch the VM (as it still thought it was powered up and running normally). Once removed from the ESXi, vCenter recognized a change and showed an "orphaned" status on the VM. This then allowed me to remove the VM from vCenter's inventory.
Now, when I tried to import the VDX file back into vCenter, I received a "VM is not linked after host sync" error. I could find no solution to this issue and didn't have the time to wait on a VMware support call, so I decided that I would create a new VM with the same name (SP01) and just use the existing VDMK file.
This however brought up another error, as every time I tried to power on the new SP01 VM (even with out the old VDMK being used), I got "a general system error occured" and the VM would fail to power up.
I tried locating the VM on different ESXi hosts, datastores, even a different cluster. If I had a VM named "SP01" it wouldn't power on.
My "solution" has been to call the VM SP02, use a copy of the original VDMK, and all seems to be fine. But I now have a disjoint between what the Guest OS thinks the system is called, and what the VM in VMware is called. I haven't dared to try changing the name back to SP01, as I fear breaking what I have currently working.
My question, finally, is how can I clear the name of SP01 in vCenter so that I can once again have a VM with that name?
