After a short break away from the computer screen I’m starting to get back into the swing of things. Since I’ve been gone a new Update release of vCenter 5.1 came out on the 1st August. While going through the release notes I came across a scary yet oddly amusing resolved issue. I went through the release notes of Update 1a and didn’t see any known issues related to this issue. So I can only assumed it has been identified / manifested between the the prior update and this current update.
Below is an extract of the resolved issue from the release notes. If only for this issue it’s well worth scoping the update to 1b of vCenter 5.1 asap. I wonder how many admins have been burnt by this issue?!?! It does sound like a rare situation and you’d have to been in a pretty masochistic mood to multiple attempt to delete the folder of a powered on VM.
All virtual machine folders on a VMFS volume are deleted after a single virtual machine folder is attempted for delete resulting in failure, and you choose Delete again by using the Datastore Browser
When you attempt to delete a virtual machine folder while the virtual machine is powered on, a message similar to Cannot delete file. [VMFS] <virtual_Machine_Name> is displayed. If you click the Delete button again without closing the datastore browser or changing the selection, and attempt to delete the same virtual machine folder that failed to delete earlier, all virtual machine folders on the VMFS volume might now get deleted.
Source: