How to power off a Virtual Machine on an ESXi host via Putty
Sometime a virtual machine may not responsive and cannot be stopped or killed, then this is a workaround to reboot the virtual machine via putty.
The esxcli command can be used locally or remotely to power off a virtual machine running on ESXi 5.x or later.
- Open a console session where the esxcli tool is available, either in the ESXi Shell, the vSphere Management Assistant (vMA), or the location where the vSphere Command-Line Interface (vCLI) is installed.
- Get a list of running virtual machines, identified by World ID, UUID, Display Name, and path to the.vmx configuration file, using this command:esxcli vm process list
- Power off one of the virtual machines from the list using this command:esxcli vm process kill –type=[soft,hard,force]–world-id=WorldNumber
Notes:
Three power-off methods are available. Soft is the most graceful, hard performs an immediate shutdown, and force should be used as a last resort.
Alternate power off command syntax is: esxcli vm process kill -t [soft,hard,force] -w WorldNumber - Repeat Step 2 and validate that the virtual machine is no longer running.
