ESXi host is not coming back online / VM shows disconnected

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi
• VMware Telco Cloud Platform

Issue/Introduction

After an ESXi outage results in a host being permanently offline (e.g., due to hardware failure), VMs registered on this host show as disconnected or orphaned in the vSphere Client. In some cases, the "Remove from Inventory" option is unavailable or greyed out.

Symptoms:

1. Virtual machines status displays as Disconnected or Orphaned.
   
   
2. Attempts to re-register these VMs on a healthy host fail with the error: VM already exists.
   
   
3. The Remove from Inventory task is greyed out for the affected VMs in the vCenter UI.
   
   Example:

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi: 7.x, 8.x

Telco cloud platform: 5.0

Cause

vCenter Server retains the metadata and inventory registration of the VM on the original disconnected host. Because the stale inventory object remains in the vCenter database, any attempt to register the same .vmx file path on another host triggers a database conflict.

Resolution

Use one of these options to manage VMs while the host is offline:

Option 1: Remove the host from vCenter

1. Right-click the affected host in the vSphere Client.
   
   
2. Select Remove from Inventory. This clears the stale record from the vCenter database.
   
   
3. Register the VMs on an online host by following Add or Register a Virtual Machine (VM) in vCenter Server
   
   

Option 2: Use the Host Client UI

1. Log in to the Host Client UI of an online ESXi host.
   
   
2. Click Storage in the inventory.
   
   
3. Right-click a datastore and click Register a VM.
   
   
4. Select the .vmx file for the VM and click Register.

Additional Information

For further assistance or to speak with a Support Engineer, see Contact Support. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on your respective region.