Certainly the renameing should be first and foremost - this is why standards exist and you're right to point that out to your superiors.

Don't you have some VM management software - even the default stuff you get when you by your hypervisor software? As you take advantage of VM migration and load sharing, you're going to have a nightmare trying to manage this without good software. And there is so much out there already rather than rolling your own with threads and tcpdump.