Getting out of trouble with SCVMM

I have been using SCVMM (System Center Virtual Machine Manager) more and more in my home environment of late.  But I also keep getting myself in trouble – usually because I keep on trying to do things the “Hyper-V way”.

Recently– I tried to do a quick storage migration of a running virtual machine from my production server to my dev / test server (yes – I do have production and dev / test Hyper-V servers at home) and the migration failed.  I retried the migration through SCVMM and it failed again.

At this point in time I should have chosen to undo the operation through the SCVMM console.  Unfortunately – I instead dived into the Hyper-V Management console and deleted the snapshots that SCVMM had created as part of the quick storage migration. 

This left me in a bad position.

SCVMM still had this virtual machine marked as failed – and any attempt to repair the virtual machine would fail too – as whenever I tried to repair, or undo, the migration the first thing SCVMM would do is to look for the virtual machine snapshots that I had deleted.  To make things even worse – the “failed” virtual machine was running on my production Hyper-V server, which I really did not want to reboot to help SCVMM sort out the state of the system.

After searching the web and thinking about it for a bit – I came up with a simple solution.

I removed my production Hyper-V server from SCVMM, and then added it back.  Neither of these operations affect the virtual machines running on the Hyper-V server – and it effectively resets the state of the server for SCVMM.

The whole process took about 5 minutes and I soon had all my virtual machines correctly listed in SCVMM.

Cheers,
Ben