A problem that most Virtualization Administrators need to deal with is Orphaned VMDK files (or Zombie VMDK files, as some people call them). These are Virtual Machine hard drive files that are just hanging out, taking up storage, but are attached to no VMs. How can this happen? Well, the most common way is when an administrator needs to delete a VMDK but isn't quite ready to commit... so, after pressing "remove", they select "remove from virtual machine" rather than "remove and delete files". The intent is always good: "I want to be able to restore this if it turns out to be necessary... so I'll just come back and delete it next week if nothing breaks!" But, of course, next week something else happens and the file doesn't get deleted. After a little while, it turns into "which files did I rename, again?" and nothing seems to happen.So, how do you deal with these orphaned files? Well, a few years ago I found a script …