We had an issue the other day with our filers and because of it, some our machines orphaned themselves and VMware didn’t know what to do with them. If I tried to power off the machine I would get the error,
Basically, I don’t even think the machine was on, but my vCenter server showed it as being powered on. Luckily I found a KB article that deals with this. http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1014165.
SSH into the host that the VM is said to be running from. Then run the command:
esxcli vm process list
This gives you a list of all the running VMs, and the important piece you want is the World ID. Copy that, and then run the command:
esxcli vm process kill –type=[soft,hard,force] –world-id=WorldNumber
Note: 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.
As you can see, I ran this command and it killed the VM. After doing this, I was able to power on the VM without issue. I used soft and it worked.
That’s all I have for today.
Favoritevmguy 