Removing orphaned and invalid VMs

[jedijeff]

I have a couple of VMs that were powered off. One is showing Orphaned one is showing Invalid. I believe they got messed up during an HA event. Needless to say, I really do not need these VMs anymore but just want to clean up vCenter. Will "removing from inventory"  take them out properly of vCenter? Like I said they were powered off and I really have no use for them anymore. They are actually on a datastore which we will be removing soon anyway so I need to clean them up.

[rcporto]

If you want just remove from inventory without delete from the disk, you can just select the option Remove From Inventory, and if this option is unavailable, see this KB: VMware KB: Deleting an orphaned virtual machine when the Remove option is not available

[mribeiro01]

Hi jedijeff,

Sometimes you can not delete vms orphans. You must first restart the ESXi services where this is vm. In some cases only even with the host reboot. See kb https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=1003742&sliceId=2&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&dialogID=51038840&stateId=1%200%2059900693

But in general the kb mentioned for Richardson will help you