ESXi reboots after executing "kill 1"

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

ESXi reboots after executing "kill 1" command.

Environment

VMware ESXi
VMware ESX

Resolution

Unlike a standard Unix shell such as bash, running kill 1 in ESXi does not terminate a background job (like kill %1). Instead, it sends a SIGTERM signal to the init world process in ESXi.

When the init world receives SIGTERM, it initiates a reboot, and as a result, the ESXi host eventually reboots. Be careful.