IT Infrastructure Services (IT IS) Blog

How to power off a Virtual Machine on an ESXi host via Putty

Posted on July 3, 2015 Updated on July 3, 2015

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.

1. 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.
2. 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
3. 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

4. Repeat Step 2 and validate that the virtual machine is no longer running.