Unprotecting replica with sviconfig

[unsichtbare]

Hi everyone -

I was recently faced with the not unfamiliar challenge of removing an orphaned replica from vCenter. What happened is that the datastore where the replica and linked clones lived had failed and left them all orphaned. Because this type of situation does not come up every day, I had to do some digging and re-learn how to un-protect the replica. What I realized as soon as I got started was the the VMware KB (1008704) pertaining to this very operation is (for me at least) either incomplete or incorrect.

Here is the syntax that worked on the View Composer I was addressing (VIew 5 /Composer 2.7) I have left the syntax entirely alone (including CMD line-wraps) and altered only the domain/user/password to protect the user. Don't forget Case Sensitive:

c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware View Composer>sviconfig -operation=Unprotec

tEntity -VcUrl=https://vcenter.mydomain.com/sdk -Username=mydomain\vservice

-Password=P@ssw0rd -InventoryPath="/control/vm/VMwareViewComposerReplic

aFolder/replica-0f95838f-6f65-484d-a3e1-d68bc666f6a2"

WARNING: Unprotecting VC managed entities will allow operations

(power on, delete, migrate) that can cause existing linked clones connected

to those managed entities to fail to work correctly.

Establishing connection to the VC server.

VC server connection established successfully.

Looking for the entity on the VC server.

VirtualMachine found.

SviConfig finished successfully.

VirtualMachine with MoId vm-8975 sucessfully unprotected.

c:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware View Composer>

In this example, "control" is the name of the Data Center and "vservice" is the vCenter service account which is both domain account and a local system administrator on the vCenter Server.

The points I would like to differentiate from the KB are as follows:

• The command would not function in this environment unless the path was quoted"" (which is not indicated in the KB) - I thought first that maybe MY path had spaces, but it did not so no understanding of the requirements for quotes.
• The command as indicated in the KB ends with: Recursive=true - In the environment I was addressing, the command would not function with Recursive=true, returning neither an error message nor performing any operation.