Hi Gene,
Agreed that its the vmware API which provides the information, but its the vmware probe which pulls the information and publishes the data to the UIM DB . So, it should be an option in the vmware probe to decide which information we publish as the "Name" .
Ideally we should not be picking up the "Target Name" visible in vCenter as the machine name , we should pickup the Hostname or the DNS name as the name of the VM. Normally users rename the target name in vcentre to anything other than the hostname for identification , so that should not be a reference for us to create a host name for the server in UIM DB