I have had to do this a few times so will try to document the process I followed. If you have numerous datastores then make a note of which datastore the machine sits in. The next step is to un...
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I have had to do this a few times so will try to document the process I followed. If you have numerous datastores then make a note of which datastore the machine sits in. The next step is to unregister the VM from vCenter / ESXi Then you need to enable SSH on your ESXi host Use Putty or something similar to connect to the ESXi host Run the following commands (in italics) cd /vmfs/volumes/<datastore name> ie if the datastore containing the VM is named datastore1 then you would run cd /vmfs/volumes/datastore1 Next run ls to check that the VM folder is there Rename the folder using mv <oldVMFoldername> <newVMFoldername> Change into the folder with cd <NewVMFoldername> Rename the nvram, vmsd, vmx and <VMname-xxxx.hlog> files by running mv again ie mv oldname.nvram newname.nvram mv oldname.vmsd newname.vmsd mv oldname.vmx newname.vmx mv oldname-1234.hlog newname-1234.hlog Rename the vmdk file with vmkfstools -E oldname.vmdk newname.vmdk Edit the vmx file with vi newname.vmx Change the references from oldname to newname within this file Register the VM with the ESXi server and it should power on ok This link gives more detail and other methods VMware KB: Renaming a virtual machine and its files in VMware ESXi and ESX
