Forcing a frozen virtual machine to power off in VMware Workstation for Windows

Products

• VMware Desktop Hypervisor

Issue/Introduction

This article provides steps to force a virtual machine to shut down.

Symptoms:

• Virtual machine fails to respond during the shut down process
• You are unable to power off a virtual machine
• The virtual machine stops responding
• Virtual machine takes a lot of time to shutdown.
• Virtual machine is stuck on a black screen while shutting down.

Environment

VMware Workstation 8.x (Windows)
VMware Workstation Pro 15.x (Windows)
VMware Workstation 11.x (for Windows)
VMware Workstation 7.x (Windows)
VMware Workstation Pro 12.x (Linux)
VMware Workstation Pro 12.x (Windows)
VMware Workstation Pro 14.x (for Windows)
VMware Workstation Pro 16.x (Windows)
VMware Workstation 10.x (Windows)
VMware Workstation Pro 14.x (for Linux)
VMware Workstation 6.x (Windows)
VMware Workstation 9.x (Windows)

Resolution

Warning: Performing a hard power off has the same effect as switching off the power switch on a physical computer. Use this method only when it is absolutely necessary because it may cause data loss or file system corruption.

To force a virtual machine to power off:

1. From the Workstation menu bar, select the virtual machine to be powered off.
2. Click VM > Power > Power Off.

If the VMware Workstation user interface is not responding due to the frozen virtual machine, you may have to force the virtual machine to shut down from Windows Task Manager.

1. Click Start > Run, type taskmgr, and click OK. The Task Manager window opens.
2. Click the Processes tab.
3. Locate the vmware-vmx.exe process.
4. Click the vmware-vmx.exe process and click End Process. This stops the virtual machine process and forces it to power off.
5. Start the VMware Workstation GUI and confirm.

If the virtual machine takes a lot of time to shut down or if it gets stuck on a black screen when powering off, add the following changes to the VMware Workstation config.ini file.
 

1. Exit VMware Workstation.
2. Browse to the following location:
   
   C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Workstation
    
3. Open the config.ini file in a text editor, e.g. Notepad
4. Add the following lines:
   
   prefvmx.minVmMemPct = "100"
   mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE"
   mainMem.partialLazySave = "FALSE"
   mainMem.partialLazyRestore = "FALSE"
    
5. Save the file and close the text editor.
6. Launch VMware Workstation and start the virtual machine.