VMware vCenter Server 5.x shows an orphaned or invalid secondary fault tolerance virtual machine

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

• Cannot add primary Fault tolerance (FT) virtual machine to the vCenter server inventory.
• Unable to unregister or remove the secondary FT virtual machine from inventory or interact with the virtual machine.
• Cannot manually unregister the secondary FT virtual machine directly on the host via SSH or console command line.

Environment

• VMware vCenter Server 5.0.x
• VMware vCenter Server 5.1.x
• VMware vCenter Server 5.5.x

Cause

This issue occurs when a Fault Tolerant virtual machine becomes orphaned due to a host crash or other event and the replicated virtual machine halts and requires additional steps to recover.

Resolution

Manually unregister the virtual machine from the host:

1. Disable Fault Tolerance. For more information, see Disabling Fault Tolerance manually on the ESXi host when vCenter Server is not available (2116110).
2. After Fault Tolerance is disabled, manually unregister the virtual machine from the host.
   
   Note: If the option to remove from inventory is still grayed out on the virtual machine:
   
   
1. Go to the etc/vmware/hostd directory and locate the vmInventory.xml file.
   
2. Take a backup of the vmInventory.xml file.
3. Edit the file and remove the entry for the virtual machine by removing the section:
   
   <ConfigEntry id=" "> ... </ConfigEntry>
   
   
4. Restart the services by running this command:
   
   services.sh restart
   
   
   Note: Now you can remove the orphaned virtual machine from the inventory.
   
   
3. Readd the .vmx file of the primary Fault Tolerant virtual machine to the inventory.

Additional Information

Disabling Fault Tolerance manually on the ESXi host when vCenter Server is not available