Scenario: We have an Ubunutu (12.0.10) VM called btn-dnsng-v1 which was not responding on an ESX 5.0 host. It was only a test VM so not entirely important. Restart Guest wasn’t available (as VMware Tools wasnt installed) so we had to do a Reset. Upon the reset the VM stuck at 95 percent and no other operations were available.

 

We enabled SSH on the host so we could get CLI access. The VM state indicated it was still running so the best thing to do is just kill the WID. To  find the WID use this command:

esxcli vm process list

This displays a list of VMs and their attributes. We are specifically interested the World ID.

 

Once we have the WID it is just a matter of killing the process:

esxcli vm process kill –type=soft –world-id=28664590

(note:  I believe esxcli vm process kill -t soft -w 28664590 will have the same affect)

 

Below are a couple of screenshots from the tasks/events  which show the journey the little VM went on! 🙂

 

Strangely our HA kicked in and redeployed the VM on another of our hosts. I shall investigate why this happened.

 

The VM then started again successfully.