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Soft and Hard Stopping an Unresponsive VM Print E-mail

Sometimes a virtual machine can stop working and fail to respond. While you may not be able to power off the VM gracefully via VI client to vCenter or ESX there is another way to do this, ensuring it is powered off properly. If you kill off the process the VM is running under you may stop it from working again. You can use the vmware-cmd command in the service console to stop the VM.


Logon to the ESX Server that is running the VM.

List all VMs on that ESX Server (Check you VM is listed here):
vmware-cmd -l

Get the current state of the VM:
vmware-cmd /path/to/vm getstate

If an answer is needed run:
vmware-cmd /path/to/vm answer

Try to soft stop the VM:
vmware-cmd /path/to/vm stop trysoft

Failing that try to hard stop the VM:
vmware-cmd /path/to/vm stop hard

Failing that kill the master user world id (vmid):
cat /proc/vmware/vm/*/names | grep myvm1

less /proc/vmware/vm/ value/cpu/status

/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmkload_app -k 9 vmid#

Failing that crash the VM and get the logs (run in a directory with some space to spare):
vm-support -x
vm-support -X vmid#
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DISCLAIMER: All advice, tips, guides and other information on this website is provided as-is with no warranty or guarantee. While most information is correct to the best of my knowledge, I am not reponsible for any issues that may arise in using the information, and you do so at your own risk. As always before doing anything; check, double check, test and always make a backup.

 

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