Refresh VMware inventory without removing VMs

March 27, 2014Written by Bill

If you have several VMs in your VMware inventory that are shown as either inaccessible or invalid, you can actually reload the configuration without the need to shutdown the VM or put the host in maintenance mode.

This is done via the reload method on the Virtual Machine View object in PowerCLI. The result is effectively the same as dropping the VM from the inventory and adding it back via the vmx file.

Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine | ?{$_.Runtime.ConnectionState -eq "invalid" -or $_.Runtime.ConnectionState -eq "inaccessible"} | % {$_.reload()}

Ensure you are in the PowerCLI and connected to your vCenter server before executing this command or it will fail.

Cloud, VMware Configuration, Inaccessible, Invalid, Machine, PowerCLI, Reload, vCenter, VI, View, Virtual, VMware, VMX

Similar posts

Saving your VCSA with Ephemeral Port Groups

December 4, 2020

After a recent outage a customer was unable to bring their VCSA back online. A quick investigation showed that while the VCSA was powered on after the host failure, the virtual NIC was disconnected. The customer simply logged into the host and edited the settings for the NIC to get things back online: Not quite. […]

Guest VM Network Unstable due to Guest Introspection

June 23, 2020

There are many reasons a guest VM can have an unstable network connection. Here, I’ll detail one of the lesser know causes. This issue was previously unknown but is now listed as a known issue with the versions of VMware Tools current as of the time of this writing. It’s a well-known and well-documented practice […]

Recovering from a hostd unresponsive event

March 4, 2016

The hostd service is the life-blood of your ESXi host. Because hostd is involved in so much of the behind-the-scenes work of ESXi it can be easily affected by changes in storage or network topology. Here is how to recover when hostd is unresponsive.