(Not so) happy Monday morning!

First request of the day – one of the VM’s was unresponsive and had to be rebooted (RDP was hanging and no incoming connections were allowed). I’m thinking not a big deal so VM was rebooted but I have noticed that VMware Tools were not up to date so thought why not update them at the same time? This is where it all started to go wrong… At this point VM was not responding (which I knew about) AND VMware Tools install was totally stuck on some random percentage in Recent Tasks. Great start.

Few things I have tried before finding the proper solution:

Trying to cancel the install by right clicking on Initiated VMware Tools Install or Upgrade in Recent Tasks didn’t yield any results. Option was greyed out.

Powering off the VM was unsuccessful as well. Again, options to Power Off, Reset etc. were greyed out.

Ejecting the .iso file that’s responsible for VMware Tools install didn’t help since the .iso was not connected.

To get me out of this hole (and users screaming that the application was down..) I had to kill the install of VMware Tools. Command to work out the ID_Number of the affected VM is:

and the expected result with the ID_Number which we’re going to use in the next command:

To actually terminate the install:

and the outcome:

That’s it, I’m off the hook.