I had installed 4 new guest OS VMs on my test ESXi server (I'm trying to put an ESXi server through the paces for a purchase evaluation for senior management), and they worked fine. I then tried to install a 5th guest OS VM that required over 500GB of storage. When it failed, I did some KB research and discovered the process for reconfiguring the datastore with a larger block size to accomodate larger storage partitions. I moved the existing VMs to another datastore (using the native move tools in the datastore browser screen, on the configuration tab in the VI client), reformatted the original datastore properly and, using the same tools, moved the existing VMs back to the original datastore. However, eventhough the VM guest folders are visible in the datastore browser (and in the ESXi server OS command line) their name labels and all configuration seem to have gone missing. I can neither power on the VMs nor even browse their configuration settings (although they are visible as "unknown" entities in the VI client). What happened? Did I do something wrong? How can I fix this situation so I can retrieve my VMs? Any help or advice from the VMWare veterans would be greatly appreciated...
