One of my colleagues is currently researching cloud services.  Like me, he is also very interested in VMware Hybrid Cloud and created an account as soon as it was made available.  However, despite using supported browsers, he ran into problems trying to delete a virtual machine that he had created earlier.  Every time he tried, an error was returned:

There was an error running your last operation.  Press CTRL + E to refresh the page and try again or logout and log back in before trying again

He obviously tried refreshing and was unsuccessful.  In case there was something wrong with his browsers, I offered my help as I had a freshly built virtual machine.  This is what the problem looked like when deletion was attempted:

Problem Screen

So, the deletion failed on my new machine as well, proving there was a bigger issue present.  I decided to fire up vCloud Director as that’s where I go for more control.  Once there and in the “VM” pane, this is what I saw:

Partially Running VM

It seemed very likely that the “Partially Powered Off” status was causing the problem.  As the machine was up for deletion anyway, I forced a power off:

Powering Off

Followed by a deletion:

Deletion of VM

This time, the machine went without issues and it was all clean:

VM Gone!

After that, I went to the regular vCloud screen.  The error machine was still there but one needs to “Reload”, to clean up the interface.

Back in vCloud

Once done, the machine was gone.  I reported back to my colleague who was then able to create the new machine he wanted.  I thought this is worth documenting as a quick blog post because the error message being seen wasn’t accurate enough and other people might see the same thing.

Moral of the story: When in doubt, use the vCloud Director interface! 🙂