The orphaned VMs in vCenter inventory is an unusual view in experienced administrator’s Web/vSphere Client window. But in large environments, where many people manage hosts and VMs it will happen sometimes.

You do know how to get rid of them using traditional methods described in VMware KB articles and by other well known bloggers, but there’s a quite elegant new method using dcli.
This handy tool is available in vCLI package, in 6.5/6.7 vCSA shell and vCenter Server on Windows command prompt. Dcli does use APIs to give an administrator the interface to call some methods to get done or to automate some tasks.

How to use it to remove orphaned VMs from vCenter inventory?

1. Open an SSH session to vCSA and log in as root user.
2. Run dcli command in an interactive mode.

   dcli +i

3. Get a list of VMs registered in vCenter’s inventory. Log in as administrator user in your SSO domain. You can save credentials in the credstore for future use.

   com vmware vcenter vm list

4. From the displayed list get VM’s MoID (Managed Object Id) of the affected VM, e.g. vm-103.
5. Run this command to delete the record of the affected VM using its MoID from vCenter’s database.

   com vmware vcenter vm delete --vm vm-103

6. Using Web/vSphere Client check the vCenter’s inventory if the affected VM is now deleted.

It’s working!