Hey experts.
I have just gone through an upgrade to vSphere 6.5 and 6.7 and therefore I am cleaning up datastores. While doing so, I found a few replica disks that in my opinion are not used anymore. So I googled and found this KB2009844. This found a few unused, but not all of them. I then moved on to KB1031842 and couldn't find any VMs running on these replica disks. They seem to reference themselves like so:
/vmfs/volumes/57f75a4c-ba0cbaa1-6717-62698250000a/replica-33d98af9-4f75-4505-ac15-25f82e6d23c9/replica-33d98af9-4f75-4505-ac15-25f82e6d23c9-000001-digest.vmdk-->>parentFileNameHint="replica-33d98af9-4f75-4505-ac15-25f82e6d23c9-digest.vmdk"
While I was browsing through those disks, I noticed they still had an annotation, which indicated that they are replica disks based on gold images that have been deleted a long time ago.
I then found this KB1008704 to unprotect them to manually delete them, but I am wondering if I should really do this. I am assuming that if sviconfig -operation=findunusedreplica doesn't identify the replica disks as unused, there must be something in the database that references them.
I was wondering if anyone has ever done this, and if anyone could provide some tips on how to track down those references in order to clean up the database and not run into new problems down the line.