I recently reinstalled the vCenter Server at work, and in my never ending wisdom *cough*, I decided to do that on new hardware. That entitled using the same host name plus the appendix _NEW. Now, I know this isn’t conforming with DNS naming schemes (iirc underscore isn’t a valid DNS char), however it worked …
So once I had everything installed on the new hardware, I switched the ESX servers from the old vCenter to the freshly installed one. Once that was finished, I shut down the old vCenter server, changed IP address and host name of the new one and rebooted. That basically worked, even though suddenly every ESX in my inventory was disconnected. After reconnecting all ESX servers everything was back online.
Then I tried sorting the list of All VMs in my vCenter and got the error message “Unable to look up vcenter_NEW.home.barfoo.org” when doing so .. I was like *WTF*, searched the registry found a few ones, and after a quick reboot tried again … No luck, still the same error. After looking through the VMware Knowledgebase, I actually found one that worked for me, even if it didn’t apply to my environment 100 percent (we don’t use Linked Mode) …
After fixing the vmw-vc-URL in each property, the sorting actually works!