Removing Orphaned VMs from the vSphere 6.5 Web Client

As you probably know, vSphere 6.5 has removed the vSphere Client Windows application. Now all vSphere management is through the web client or the new HTML client, confusingly also called vSphere Client. My lab has been vSphere 6.5 for a few months and running the vCenter appliance since there is now an upgrade process from the Windows vCnter 6.0 to VCSA 6.5. Naturally, my lab is a messy place, I try things that end up breaking and leaving a mess around. I ended up with a few orphaned VMs. Orphaned VMs are when vCenter has a VM registered but the ESXi server does not have the same VM. Happily, my orphaned VMs were disposable and I did not loose anything when they went away dues to a VSAN experiment. But I was left with three orphaned VMs in my inventory, making it look messy. In the Windows vSphere client, you can simply right click on the VMs and remove them from the inventory.

In the Windows vSphere client, you can simply right click on the VMs and remove them from the inventory. In the web client, the right click menu is much shorter and does not include Remove from Inventory. After a little poking around through all the sub-menus, I did locate the right option and was able to remove the orphans. It is quite deep in the submenus, rightly so as you will seldom need to remove VMs without deleting the files (Delete from Disk action). The web client is not a direct replacement for the old vSphere client, expect to take some time to learn new ways to do old tasks.

© 2017, Alastair. All rights reserved.

About Alastair

I am a professional geek, working in IT Infrastructure. Mostly I help to communicate and educate around the use of current technology and the direction of future technologies.
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