I had an issue today where the secondary instance of a virtual machine with Fault Tolerance enabled was registered to a host (vSphere 5 ESXi) – even tho the original VM wasn’t in inventory at all.
Sorry, no screen shots for this one.
The original VM had been removed but (as this is a demo environment) apparently the host was offline during removal. The VM did not appear in vCenter at all (primary or secondary) but when you connected directly to the host or queried using vmware-cmd it would show up as “name (secondary) disabled”. It was completely grayed out in Inventory and could not be changed at all. The vmware-cmd -s unregister command reported it would not work on “this object.”
I rebooted vCenter and the hosts with no improvement.
In a fit of pique I deleted the original VM directory (which still existed) then rebooted the host and low and behold “remove from Inventory” became an option on the still-grayed-out VM.
YMMV
