Today I have read the release notes from vSphere 5.1 Update 1 (released per 25. April 2013) and I noticed the comeback from the long-awaited “Storage vMotion rename feature”.
It is not really a feature – more a bug – but it was very helpful in the past. Till vSphere 5 Update 2 a Storage vMotion renamed the virtual machine files and folder to match with the display name in vCenter.
With vSphere 5 Update 2 this “bug” was fixed by VMware, although this was not entirely welcomed by the community.
But as you can see in the release notes, this will change now:
vSphere 5 Storage vMotion is unable to rename virtual machine files on completing migration
In vCenter Server, when you rename a virtual machine in the vSphere Client, the VMDK disks are not renamed following a successful Storage vMotion task. When you perform a Storage vMotion task for the virtual machine to have its folder and associated files renamed to match the new name, the virtual machine folder name changes, but the virtual machine file names do not change.This issue is resolved in this release. To enable this renaming feature, you need to configure the advanced settings in vCenter Server and set the value of the provisioning.relocate.enableRename parameter to true.
Thank you very much, VMware!!!