If you come across an issue where a Virtual Machine (Vmware) is not responding and you are unable to power down, shut down, logon etc, the below instructions will help you shutdown the virtual machine.

1) Launch Putty.exe
2) Type the ESX server name where the machine resides on (You should be able to check this by right clicking the Virtual Machine and clicking properties and then the summary tab.
3) Click Open
4) Type the username and password.
5) Once logged in type su – and press enter
6) Type the root password
7) Browse to the location where your Virtual server is located. To locate the path to the vmware machine type vmware-cmd -l (Note: letter l not number one)
8.) If you wish to know the state of the machine type vmware-cmd <path.vmx> getstate
9) Type; ps -efww |grep ‘servername’ (You may need to type efwww if you’re using ESX 3.5. An additional ‘W’)
10) Press Enter
11) You should now be presented with something like the below (See code below output). It needs to be in a similar format. If after running the above command the output is one line, then this has not run correctly. The output needs to be similar to the below (not one line of output but approx 3 lines).
12) If the above command does not work for you, try the following command: ps -auxwww |grep -i <VMNAME>.vmx

Output

root  65345    1  0 15:24   ?     /usr/lib/……………..path continued…………………..
path continued………………..path continued………………………..
root    1234    5678  0 12:25 grep ‘servername’

13) Type kill -9 (the number highlighted above. This number will change each time you run the command in step 7)
14) Press Enter
15) Your Virtual Server should power off
16) Power the Virtual server backup