A few days ago I rebooted on of our more important virtual machines to increase RAM size. But after shutting down I was unable to edit the VM, cryptic error message "File not found" (without telling me what file). Cutting a long story short, the vmx file along with nvram files etc. were all lost, only the vmdk file was there. The hardware is ok (HP ProLiant DL120 G6).
Now I know there are plenty of articles in the web and in the VMware Knowledge Base how to restore the vmx file (essentially make a new VM and import the vmdk). That's not the issue. Google for "orphaned VM" or "missing vmx". The steps to recover the vmdk were not working so we restored from backup.
The question is - and I could not find an answer for that - is: How can I prevent this from happening in the future? It severely decreased all of our trust here that were putting into vSphere. I refuse to somehow let it go and say "oh well so my backups get used from time to time"...
I removed the host (that has some of the more important machines as already stated) from vCenter and manage it now standalone. What do other say about that?