I just upgraded to 7.13 from 7.11  in order to convert to Instant Clone pools and then complete the upgrade to 2006. I am simply installing the 7.13 agent on the parent image and then creating the IC pools, then deleting the LC pools, as per VMware's guide. . Everything was going well until the last pool. After creating the IC pool, I deleted the LC pool, and the parent image disappeared. I went back and looked at all the tasks and could see all the deletions of the vm's from the pool, and the folder they were in, but there is not a task reporting the deletion of the parent. Very strange. I also notice on the cluster that this pool is on there are no cp-parents. Is that because the parent image is gone?

Anyway, the folder for the parent image was still in the data store with three vmdk files. So I recovered by creating a new VM and adding the vmdk for the hard disk. So basically, I guess have my parent VM back, although I notice not all the customization are recovered.

Question - I noticed that the cp-replicas and cp-template all have full clone options, clone to VM and clone to template. Would this also be a way to create a parent image if you did a clone to vm? Or clone to template and the template to vm?

Thanks!