How to kill a stuck VM on ESX(i) 4.1 using esxcli

With so many new features in vSphere 4.1, you might have not noticed the new additions to the esxcli utility. One new feature is the ability to remotely kill a stuck or hung virtual machine running on ESX or ESXi. Prior to vSphere 4.1, the process of killing a stuck VM meant you had to use a variety of methods and tools that included vmware-cmd, vm-support, vmkload_app and ps/kill and required the use of either Service Console on ESX or Tech Support Mode for ESXi. Depending on how "stuck" your VM was, you would start from the most gentle method to killing your VM with prejudice (kill -9 [pid]).

A new namespace called "vms" has now been added and there are two available operations: list running VMs on a host or killing a specific VM. To kill a VM, you will need to specify the kill type and VM's world id.

Here is an example of listing all running VMs on an ESXi host:

When a VM gets into a stuck state in which you have no other option than to forcefully stop the VM, you will have three types of options to kill a VM: soft, hard and force. Per the help command, you should always perform the kill operations in the following order:

soft – Will give the VMX process a chance to shutdown cleanly (like kill or kill -SIGTERM)
hard – Will shutdown the process immediately (like kill -9 or kill -SIGKILL)
force – Should be used as a last resort attempt to kill the VM

The final resort, is to reboot the host if none of the above work.

Here is an example of various kill types:

Here is an example of killing a VM using the "soft" method, you should see the value of "true" if the operation was successful.

This was one feature users have been asking for with regards to managing VMs on ESXi, where the Service Console was no longer available. You do not need to login to Tech Support Mode to forcefully kill a VM and from what I have been told, if the above does not work, it will not work in Tech Support Mode either. I am hoping a public API for esxcli operations will be exposed which can be leverage by the various vSphere SDK's (e.g. vSphere SDK for Perl, PowerCLI, VI Java, etc.)