after restarting a vm, another vm with different ip address appears

[_pGwtech]

Hi vMware community,

Background on the issue,

The vm originally created called MISDEVDB01 with an ip address of ***.**.**.56 as a Windows Server 2008 R2.

The server was shutdown and when it was powered back online, a different vm with the same host name appeared with an ip address of ***.**.**.16 as a Windows Server 2012.

This happened when the vm was first created, but after a second shutdown,powered on cycle, the original Windows Server 2008 R2 appeared and has been online for ever since (so we didn't investigate the issue at the time).

Now that the 2012 vm image has appeared, we need to bring back the 2008 R2 vm server.

What we tried,

At first, we thought we created two servers from VM template on two different ESX, but this wasn't the case.

We thought maybe there is another vm with a different vm name (with same host name) in ESX, but searching ESXi inventory for ip address ***.**.**.56, does not find a vm.

The .vmdk files are somewhere on a datastore and I have a backup of the server at the file system level (worst case we rebuild 2008 R2 and restore from backup).

However, we need to know what happened and correct the issue.

Thanks for any help in this regard,

_pGwtech

[_pGwtech]

Our team is thinking about deleting and re-creating the vm today.

I'm concerned that the issue is still resident.

Any info would be helpful at this point.

Thanks,

_pGwtech

[cykVM]

I would suggest to create a PowerCLI script listing you all running VMs with their datstore/VMDK files first. Maybe you can extend this: http://vniklas.djungeln.se/2011/12/05/virtual-machine-vmdk-file-report-with-powercli/

It sounds pretty weird that another machine with different OS and IP comes up.

Maybe even a brief look onto the *.vmx file sheds some light into it? It could be possible that the VMX got corrupted somehow for example.