Occasionally I’ve run into a VM that gets stuck at 95% while powering down (or during a vMotion). I know the issue isn’t unheard of, but I didn’t run into it until working with a few ESXi 4.0.0 208167 servers. So – if you have a virtual machine hangs while shutting down – and you’re certain that you’re just not waiting for it to finish powering down, and you’ve already tried to “power off” from the client- but the power-off command is stuck at 95%, you may have to manually kill the hung VM.
- Login to the host with the hung machine via SSH (enable SSH if you haven’t already)
- do a /sbin/services.sh restart (or services vmware-mgmt restart on ESX)… which is the same thing as doing this from the ESXi console
- This command will restart the agents that are installed in /etc/init.d/ … including hostd, ntpd, sfcbd, sfcbd-watchdog, slpd and wsmand (and HA if you have it)
- When you do this, the VI/vsphere client will loose connectivity as those services restart, but VM’s that are running will not be affected
- After the services have restarted, you can re-connect via the VI client.
- Via SSH, go to the right datastore (such as, /vmfs/volumes/DatastoreName/VMname), and delete (rm -r) the *.vswp file (the swap file).
- If you can’t delete it, and you’re getting an error message to the effect… can not remove VM: device or resource busy… go find the processes associated with the VM.
- “ps auxfww|grep “vmname”
- “kill -9 ProcessIDNumber”
- After doing so, remove the orphaned VM from inventory… just right-click the “unknown” VM, and select “remove from inventory”, being careful to not delete it.
- Then delete the *.log, and *.0*. If you don’t, re-adding the VM may cause the interface to hang, and you’ll have to go through some of this all over again.
- Add the VM back to the inventory, and you should be able to start the VM.
I have run into a situation once, where a host reboot was the only way to solve the problem. But other than that, this seems to be quite effective. The short version – see steps 8 & 9.
