Q. How can I stop a VMware virtual machine (VM) from the ESX Service Console?

A. A vmware-cmd is provided that can be used to stop a VM. You need to know the location of the vmx file that defines the VM and pass the path of the VM to the command with the stop parameter. For example:

[root@savdalesx01 Win2k82]# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/iscsi-vmfs1/Win2k82/Win2k82.vmx stop

If the VM won't stop, you can use "stop hard" instead of "stop."

As a final step, you can kill the VM process by getting the process ID of the VM then killing it, but this isn't recommended. To get the process ID, use the comand

ps auxfww | grep 

Kill it with the command

kill -9

Related Reading:

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