Invalid configuration for device '0'

This dreaded message came upon me just now when I tried to reconnect a VM. I had previously shut this VM down, exported it as a OVF and imported it into a test environment to run some iometer tests against a more powerful storage to compare pvscsi performance to LSI Logic SAS. After the test environment's trial license expired I threw the entire thing away and wanted to reconnect me original VM, only to find the above mentioned dreaded message.

Following VMware's KB 2014469 on this issue I first verified that the VM was indeed connected to a free port. I then migrated it using VMotion to a different host, still no good. The third option did however do the trick and thus helped me learn something new about ESXi. It can in fact reload a VMs configuration at runtime and thus resync it with vCenter. And thanks to awk being available Option 3 can easily be shorted to a one-liner:

 vim-cmd vmsvc/reload $(vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms | grep -i VMNAME | awk '{print $1}')