Killing a hung, Frozen, Dead or otherwise unresponsive Virtual Machine

There are numerous ways to kill a Virtual Machine after it becomes unstable but my new favorite method is using the vm-support script.  This script will not only remove all active processes associated with the Virtual Machine but also compile a nice little tar file to send to support if you want to do some post analysis.

2 Easy Steps and about 5 – 10 minutes later :

1. vm-support -x will give us a list of the World IDs for the running VMs on the particular ESX host we are running the command on.
   
2. vm-support -X <vmID> will run the support script and kill the processes associated with the vmID after gathering some support and debug information.
   

After the script completes, there will be a nice little package to download and upload to support and the hung machine will be powered off.  If you need a quicker way to pull the plug, try some of the suggestions found at Virtrix. Read more here.