How to cancel a hang task in vCenter or ESXi host?

Posted on August 16, 2016 Updated on August 16, 2016

Sometime we may need to cancel an hung task like active vmotion/backup which may show as disabled from the vSphere client.

1. First check if there is an active task running for the VM in the Task and Events Tab.
2. Log in to ESXi host via SSH (using e.g. putty). If the SSH service is not running on ESXi host, please enable it.
3. Run ps command. use grep e.g. ps | grep VM_name
4. Kill the parent process by running the command kill id_parent e.g. kill 859467
5. The hang task should be canceled now and will reflect in the Tasks and Events in the vCenter.