How to kill a stuck VM?

[halr9000]

I don't know the answer to this one. What do you guys got? It can't involve logging into the service console.

Hal Rottenberg

Author of the upcoming book: Managing VMware Infrastructure with PowerShell

Co-Host, PowerScripting Podcast (http://powerscripting.net)

[admin · Accepted solution]

I don't believe there's an API for this today.

I can see a few possible workarounds:

1. VMotioning the VM to a different host and back again may solve the problem.

2. If that works, maybe there's some way to trick the system to VMotion the VM to itself?

3. If that doesn't work, you can VMotion non-misbehaving VMs somewhere else and reboot the host

[akieffer]

Run ps -elf | grep "vm name"

Then kill the pid of the stuck vm.

[halr9000]

Run ps -elf | grep "vm name"

Then kill the pid of the stuck vm.

I'm afraid you missed the point. This forum is about the VMware Toolkit for Windows. We need to know how to automate this, and to do so from Windows PowerShell. Carter pointed out that there is no way to do it from within the SDK. That means we could use plink.exe from the putty project to, in effect, do what you are talking about. Now we just need it in a script.

Author of the upcoming book: Managing VMware Infrastructure with PowerShell

Co-Host, PowerScripting Podcast (http://powerscripting.net)

[admin]

Hal,

I added a function, Stop-TkeVMProcess that will do this to the community extensions. It relies on plink. You can pipe a bunch of VMs in if needed. One drawback at the moment, it assumes the VMs are either all on the same ESX host or the ESX hosts all have the same password. Extensions here.

[halr9000]

That's cool Carter, I will have to mention the extensions in my book, they definitely have a bright future.

Author of the upcoming book: Managing VMware Infrastructure with PowerShell

Co-Host, PowerScripting Podcast (http://powerscripting.net)