Unable to remove a datastore from vCenter Server Inventory

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I recently had an issue where I was unable to remove a datastore from the vCenter Server Inventory.  The datastore was grayed out and when right-clicking, had no options.  After some digging and some research in SQL, I found a way to manually do this in the vCenter database.  Every datastore is given a unique ID and can be found and removed inside of the database.

Warning: Always make a SQL backup before attempting any manual database changes.  You never know when things might break and you need to restore.

So here we go:

  1. Stop the vCenter Server Service
  2. Open SQL Management Studio
  3. Run the following against your vCenter Server database (This will give you the datastore ID):

select ID from VPX_ENTITY where name = ‘datastore_name’

  1. Now we have the ID and can remove it from the database
  2. Run the following 3 queries individually (Using the ID we got from the previous query):

delete from VPX_DS_ASSIGNMENT where DS_ID=ID;
delete from VPX_VM_DS_SPACE where DS_ID=ID;
delete from VPX_DATASTORE where ID=ID;

  1. Finally, run the following:

delete from VPX_ENTITY where ID=ID;

If you want to verify that everything went correctly, you can run the following:

select * from VPX_DS_ASSIGNMENT where DS_ID=ID;
select * from VPX_VM_DS_SPACE where DS_ID=ID;
select * from VPX_DATASTORE where ID=ID;
select * from VPX_ENTITY where ID=ID;

Now you’ve removed the datastore from the database and can start the vCenter Server Service again. If you don’t see that it has been removed, a reboot may help. I rebooted my server just to be on the safe side.

You can check out this VMware KB for more info.