I ran into a project the other day where the VM names in vCenter did not match up with the Windows hostname of the VM. The VMware administrator was fixing this by shutting down the orignal machine and then cloning it. The problem is that he then would have to do some configuration, and then on the datastore, the name would still be wrong because it appends a _1 behind the name because that VM name already exists. The easiest way to change the name on your datastore is to do a Storage vMotion. In my example I created a VM named “Original” and then change the name to “NewName”. I will show what happened along the way.
What does the original datastore look like?
Now I renamed the VM from “Original” to “NewName”. Notice that on the datastore the folder and files still use the “Original” name.
Time to do a Storage vMotion. For my example I am using a powered off VM for simplicity. The full C# VIC will not let you do a live Storage vMotion of a VM, however, you can use the Web VIC to accomplish this.
Now the “NewName” VM is on a new host. Looking at the Datastore, we see both the folder and file names have all been changed.
Favoritevmguy 