[CentOS] a peculiar LVM failure on CentOS 6 run as a VMware 5.5 guest

Hello listmates,

I have encountered a rather peculiar situation.

We have a Centos 6 VM (64 bit) running on a VMware vSphere 5.5 server. It
was running just fine until one day I decided to reboot it and it just
would not boot up. Effectively, dracut failed to initialize the LVM, much
like under the scenario described here:

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/207593/how-to-make-lvms-at-available-boot-kernel-panic-dracut-cannot-find-logical-vo#

Following that I booted it off a Centos 6.6 install DVD in the rescue mode.
It recognized the LVM partition without a glitch, booted it and seemed
quite happy with it. having examined it, I discovered that, even though the
root partition on the original VM was an LV it lacked the lvm2 package. I
installed it, but that did not help. So at the moment I am stuck.

Hence if you can offer help on this one - please do, it will certainly be
appreciated.

Cheers,

Boris.