PowerCLI to remove orphaned VM from inventory

Recently I came across a situation where one of the VM running on ESXi 6.0 was orphaned. This happened after I updated the ESXi with a patch. All the files associated with that VM was available in the datastore. But the VM was displayed in the inventory as orphaned. There was no option available to remove the VM from inventory from the web console. Inorder to register the original VMX file, the orphaned VM needs to be removed from inventory first.

Steps to resolve this issue:

1. Connect to vCenter server using PowerCLI: Connect-VIServer 192.168.14.15
2. Get list of VMs: Get-VM | Select Name

3. In my case "HCIBench_1.6.5.1_14G" was orphaned.

4. Remove the orphaned VM: Remove-VM HCIBench_1.6.5.1_14G

5. As you can see in the above screenshot, orphaned VM is removed from inventory. Now you can go to the datastore where the original VM files are stored, click on the VMX file and register (In my case, while I tried to register the VM it resulted in an error mentioning that the item already exists. I had to reboot the vCenter server to fix this issue. After rebooting the vCenter I was able to register the VMX file of the VM).

Hope it was helpful to you. Cheers!

Reference: blog.vmtraining.net