vCloud vs DPM vs DVS Observation

Over the Easter holiday I turned off my home lab which includes vSphere and vCloud. I powered it down using methods which I thought best for different aspects of my lab so for example if vApps/VMs were under the control of vCloud Director I used VCD to shut them down. After returning I attempted to power up my lab but I noticed that vApps/VMs in vCloud failed to start with the following error:

The operation could not be performed because the object is in an invalid state.

I googled and tweeted for advice but couldn’t get a good thread to why this would happen.  I was planning all kind of resolutions like cloning out of VCD and back in again which didn’t work. As a last resort I attempted to power on the VMs through the vSphere Client. I then noticed that DPM then went about powering up my host which was in standby which was weird because nothing was running on the existing cluster host. I then started to think there are some dependencies that these VMs needed that wasn’t being fulfilled by the powered on host.  OK I knew compute wasn’t an issue and I could see all datastores so I started to probe around the network config. I had purposefully configured DVS switches for my VCD setup and that’s when I noticed “LINK DOWN”. My DVS switches only had 1 uplink each…. #fail. After checking I noticed that the Ethernet cable was dislodged. #Fix…… The moral of this story is sometimes error messages are misleading or not welled described.

Maybe VMware should look into hooking into DPM to automate the resolution.