At work we use VMware a lot. We’ve been moving to Hyper-V because it is easier to train technicians to work with, since it uses a Windows desktop. Whether VMware is better or worse than Hyper-V is for another discussion.

The other day I was working on a server for a client, the RAID card had died. When the machine was brought back to life the virtual machines that were previously registered to the hypervisor were labeled “Invalid”, with no way to remove them in the console.

Fear not, removing an invalid virtual machine from ESXi is not difficult.

First, you’ll need a SSH client. I use Putty.
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.html

Using Putty to SSH to the hypervisor, I used 2 commands to remove the invalid virtual machines.

vim-cmd /vmsvc/getallvms

This lists all the registered virtual machines. From this list you can copy and paste the names of the machines you’d like to remove.

vim-cmd /vmsvc/unregister <id>

This unregisters the VM. Change <id> to the virtual machine name from the first command.

That is it! No more invalid virtual machines.