Virtualization administrators can use snapshots on VMware ESX to travel back in time and figure out what went wrong with their virtual machines (VMs). In part one of this series I discussed how to use VMware Snapshots. In part two I explained how to delete snapshots without wasting disk space. But what do you do when your snapshots start acting funny? In this tip, we’ll troubleshoot potential problems that may come up when using snapshots on ESX.

Locating VMs that have snapshots

Trying to find out which VMs have snapshots can be challenging. There is no centralized way to do this built into the VMware Infrastructure Client or VirtualCenter, so you should periodically check your ESX servers for old snapshots that need to be deleted. There are a few methods you can use to accomplish this.   Read the entire article at source here

Sometimes the Virtual Center won’t do the job.  You virtual machine has hung and you need to kill it. Here are 2 examples of how you can kill the vm from within the service console:

1. The ‘VMWARE-CMD’ command

• Log on to the service console and issue the following command ‘vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<datastorename>/<vmname>/<vmname>.vmx stop’ you must not use the friendly datastore name.  If you need to know the location of all vm’s type ‘VMWARE-CMD -l’ that will list on vm’s and the location for the corresponding vmx file.
• If that fails, then try it with the hard option, ‘vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<datastorename>/<vmname>/<vmname>.vmx stop hard’ this command will just try and kill it without shutting it down.

2. Kill it using the PID command

• Run the following command: ps auxfww | grep <vmname> to locate the correct PID of the virtual machine,  the first number to appear in the output is your vm’s PID. Use the PID number to terminate the process by issuing kill -9 <PID NO>

Regards,

Lee Wynne 

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