Quickly recover VMware orphaned virtual machines

After the ESXi OS crashed, it was quickly reinstalled to a fresh USB.

Once 'reconnected' in vCenter the existing datastore was recognized automatically however few things were missing:
- networking settings
- firewall rules
- auto-start for any VMs
- all VMs showed as 'orphaned'

Quick way to restore the VMs :
- enable SSH
- find your volume for the datastore in /vmfs/volumes
- run these line

# find /vmfs/volumes/53456cd6-ee79d800-ad57-002590e2fde0/ -name "*.vmx" | sed

's/\(.*\)/vim-cmd solo\/registervm "\1"/' > /restorevmx

# sh /restorevmx

# rm /restorevmx

What it does is search for all .vmx files in the datastore and runs the 'vim-cmd solo/registervm' command. 

Running it on existing VMs that are not 'orphaned' will just cause the tool to skip them

The best part is that the VMs don't have to be removed from inventory to be re-added

There doesn't seem to be any downsides as long as you don't remove them in vCenter.

References: VMware KB 1006160