Unable to remove/delete a port group

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

When deleting a port group you may observe below symptoms

• Deleting/removing a port group is not permitted even though the concerned port group has no VMs or none of the VM's summary tab references that port group making it look like a 'ghost port group'.
  
  
• You also do not find that port group listed in the output for 'esxcfg-vswitch -l' on that host.

Cause

The concerned port group has reference to one of the VM snapshots which was taken earlier when that port group was in use and prevents from deleting that port group now with no VMs using that port group.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, if the snapshot is no longer required, remove it from within Snapshot manager.

Also, follow this reference KB for more information on the issue resolution Summary tab shows multiple network port groups that are not used by the virtual machine.