How to Hard Kill a stuck VM with PowerCLI

Sometimes a VM is stuck and can’t be killed with vSphere Client (or from within the VM).

On ESX, you could login and perform the famous kill –9 <PID> to kill the VM.  Most people don’t realize that this functionality has been added to PowerCLI in version 4.1 Update 1.

First, connect directly to the ESX(i) host.

Connect-VIServer -Server <Hostname> -Credential $(Get-Credential -Credential root)

It will ask you for the root password.

Next, fetch a ESXCLI object with the Get-ESXCLI cmdlet.

$esxcli = Get-EsxCli -Server <Hostname>

Run the following method of $esxcli to list all the running VMs and their World ID.

$esxcli.vms.vm.list() | Format-Table -Property DisplayName, WorldID

 

Look up the WorldID of the VM you want to kill.

Run the following method of $esxcli to kill the VM.

$esxcli.vms.vm.kill("soft", <WorldID>)

 

If it reports back with true it means the VM was killed successfully.  If you get false, try replacing soft by hard and finally by force.  Use force only as a last resort.

The possible killtypes are:

KillType	Description
soft	Try to perform a proper VM World shutdown (the old ‘kill <PID>’)
hard	Hard kill of the VM World (the old ‘kill –9 <PID>’)
force	Use all dirty tricks available to kill the damn bastard.  Use only as a last resort!

 

If these won’t allow you to kill the VM, you can only reboot the host and hope no data has been lost…