TLDR; Is there a way to register the running VMs without shutting them down to show up as running in vCenter again?
After a Site failure in a VSAN stretched cluster and after the connectivity was recovered, some VMs are showing offline in vCenter although they are running.
Now the VMs can't be managed in the vCenter or backed up.
Found a situation where VMs were shown as powered off but were indeed still running and operational from a guest OS point of view.
Tried to re-register thew VMs via the vmx file but this failed.
Have seen vmx~ files which are an indicator that the VM is currently running (although shown as offline in vCenter) checked the Networker Proxies and if those have the vmdk mounted => no
shut proxies down => no change to behavior could still not register the affected VMs
shutdown the vm from within the guest OS and checked filesystem.
lck files were gone from the vmx fil as well as the vmx~.
Removed the VM from inventory and registered it back. After was able to adjust the vmdk size and to power on the vm (customer asked for this step due to shortage of space on the guest).
VM is showing up normally and as running now in vcenter.