I am testing backup and recovery scenarios with vCenter 5.5 prior to deploying a production system.
I have two esxi hosts connected to shared storage, with no FT / HA, but do have vMotion (which works very well).
One of the final recovery scenarios I am testing is one host goes down and I need to manually move the VMs to the other host.
Because there is shared storage, there is no issue with accessing the VM files from the other host.
However, I can not remove the VM from the offline host and I cannot add the VM to the existing host.
remove-vm throws error "host is offline" (obviously)
new-vm throws error "the specified key ... already exists" (obviously)
So, the questions are
1 - how do I remove a VM from inventory when the Host server is offline?
2 - how do I use new-vm to load and rename an existing vm?
There is an existing post where the solution is to remove the HOST from inventory; after which the new-vm command works.
That is fine if you really plan on decommissioning the HOST, but if the HOST is going to be restored later this just creates more recovery headaches.
When you are in "recovery" mode, the recovery procedures need to be simple and obvious.