I ran into an issue at work where a migraton was halted because of a VM waiting for a VMWare Tools install to finish… but I didn’t want to deal with it right then. Tracking down the owner and getting permission to reboot it outside of the normal schedule was going to be a hassle.

Luckily, these installs can be cancelled via. SSH on the host server:

List all the VMs on the host: vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms Cancel the installation for the specific guest VM by using the ID (from above): vim-cmd vmsvc/tools.cancelinstall <VM ID>

[root@server01:~] vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms
Vmid     Name                     File                        Guest OS          Version                                      Annotation
1      GUEST24   [vmds03] GUEST24/GUEST24.vmx     windows8Server64Guest   vmx-13
2      GUEST38   [vmds03] GUEST38/GUEST38.vmx     windows8Server64Guest   vmx-13
38     GUEST00   [vmds04] GUEST00/GUEST00.vmx     rhel6_64Guest           vmx-08    Initially created to refresh guest03 - cancelled later
Now used as test server.
40     GUEST16   [vmds01] GUEST16_1/GUEST16.vmx   rhel7_64Guest           vmx-13
45     GUEST09   [vmds01] GUEST09/GUEST09.vmx     rhel7_64Guest           vmx-13
47     GUEST43   [vmds05] GUEST43/GUEST43.vmx     rhel7_64Guest           vmx-13
48     GUEST02   [vmds01] GUEST02/GUEST02.vmx     rhel5Guest              vmx-10
49     GUEST39   [vmds06] GUEST39/GUEST39.vmx     windows7Server64Guest   vmx-10

[root@server01:~] vim-cmd vmsvc/tools.cancelinstall 48
[root@server01:~]

After cancelling the install, I was able to finish the migration.