How to kill a VM through ESX CLI

If you got an ESX that has a VM that’s stuck which means you can’t shut it down, and it’s non-responsive but it’s running like a phantom vm on the ESX host then follow these instructions. First off understand this will kill the vm process for that VM. Note this is not considered a graceful shutdown, it’s what I call a “Fat finger” the server.

1. Find the virtual machines process id: ps auxwww | grep -i VMNAMEHERE.vmx

2. Now you should see something like: root 2315 0.0 0.2 etc….

3. The “2315″ is the process id of the VM.

4. To kill it issue the command “kill -9 2315″.

This should kill the VM.