Killing in the name of

Since vSphere has been introduced more and more of my customers are migrating to ESXi. It makes sense as the thin hypervisor is the way of the future according to VMware.

One common used argument by the admins to not use ESXi is killing a rogue VM. Normally an SSH session would be opened to the Service Console and with “kill -9″ the VM would be killed when a “power off” did not work”. Because ESXi is COS-less this is not an option. However, it is still possible to kill these VMs by using the following procedure:

login in unsupported mode:
Press <alt> + <f1> and type “unsupported” <enter>
List all running VMs:

vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms

Kill VM with vm id:

vim-cmd vmsvc/poweroff <vm id>

Please see the blog at :

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/11/27/killing-in-the-name-of/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+YellowBricks+%28Yellow+Bricks%29