Change the name of a ESXi host

Recently I needed to rename a considerable amount of ESXi 5.x hosts, VMware has published a KB article KB1010821 that describes the various way's of doing this very well. But for me there are two things that are missing in this information. First of it being that there is nothing written specifically regarding the consequences of a host renaming action on the distributed vSwitche(s) the hosts' Physical Adapters where used as dvUplinks.
When I followed the manual steps of the KB to test run the procedure I got error's regarding the adapters on the dvUplinks when removed the host from vCenter (after I first put the host in maintenance mode and disconnected it).
These error's came back after the renaming was done and I added the host again to vCenter. The host added successfully to the HA-Cluster it was previously part of, but failed to reconnect it's management, NFS and VM network through the distributed vSwitches. I had to manually run the "add host" procedure to add the physical adapters to the correct distributed vSwitches, the physical adapters used for vmkernel ports where pre-selected the adapters used for VM network I had to manually select the physical adapters which I wanted to use. With the additional steps the procedure was successful.
The second thing that not mentioned, although understandable is that you lose all historic (performance, event, task, etc.) data from the renamed host because of the "remove from vCenter" step mentioned in the KB.

When I read a blog post by Reuben Stump on the Virtuin blog called "Rename ESXi Hosts in vCenter (Without Losing Historical Data)" which describes a way of renaming a host without removing it from vCenter which let's you keep the historic data. I started thinking it could also work for the distributed vSwitch issue of having to re-add the uplinks. The way Reuben describes it is by the use of a Perl script. Running a Perl script can be done in different ways, one I like is to have VMware vCLI ( VMware vSphere Command-Line Interface) installed on a Windows computer. Especially if you have it installed on the same computer as you have PowerCLI installed, because you can then easily use PowerCLI scripting to invoke a Perl script. Please take a look at the blog post of  Robert van den Nieuwendijk, How to run VMware vSphere CLI perl scripts from PowerCLI on a PowerCLI function he has written to do this.
With the host no longer being disconnected during the renaming proces you besides keeping historical data, do not have to re-add the uplinks to the distributes vSwitches.

Of course you will need to take care that the DNS records are also updated so they reflect the new host name. vCenter will try to resolve the DNS name upon adding it to the inventory, so make sure that the DNS records on the vCenter server are refreshed / updated before you run the script.

If you don't want to resort to using Perl, please have a look at blog post Rename an ESXi 5.x Host of Luc Dekens As always he has a PowerCLI solution to almost everything, although this script does remove and re-add the host from vCenter.