Simple PowerCLI for Deleting Orphaned VMs

• First, you can try these steps from the official VMware KB. I tried this and it failed on several occasions, so I pursued another avenue.
• https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1011468
• So if the above did not work, there are other ways to do this (I found a few in Google), but this PowerCLI was the easiest and simplest way to delete these VMs.
• Open PowerShell ISE in Administrator Mode
• Open the "Initialize-PowerCLIEnvironment.ps1 script located at C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\PowerCLI\Scripts
• This will be here after you installed PowerCLI
• In order to get the Power CLI to connect to servers on the network, you might have to bypass the certificate error by putting in the following code:
• Set-PowerCLIConfiguration -InvalidCertificateAction Ignore
• Then you can connect to your server with the following command:
• Connect-VIServer -Server x.x.x.x -User vsphere.local\example - Password XXXXXXX
• Once this is done, you can now start deleting the orphaned VMs in vSphere by executing the following:
• Remove-VM –VM (VM Name) –DeletePermanently –Confirm:0
• Be WARNED! This will remove the VM from vSphere and you need to make sure this is the exact one you need to delete.