How to kill a hung or stucked VM on a Hyper-V 2012 host.

Even this happens very rarely on a Hyper-V host 😉 ,  it might still be useful under some circumstances to kill a hung or stucked VM. Most of the times the hung situation is caused by a guest shutdown request which does not get completed successfully. The GUI doesn’t provide you a solution here (neither SCVMM, Hyper-V Manager or Failover Cluster Manager). Good old Powershell will solve it for you.

Here are the steps in detail:

First we want to get the GUID of our affected VM

$vmname = "CMIRUW702"
$id = (get-vm | ? {$_.name -eq $vmname} | select id).id.guid

Now as we have to GUID we search for the VM worker process holding the virtual machine resources

$vm_pid = (Get-WmiObject Win32_Process | ? {$_.Name -match 'vmwp' -and $_.CommandLine -match $id}).ProcessId

And finally kill the VM worker process

stop-process $vm_pid -Force

Here again all together as a function:

function KillVM{  
param($vmname)
  $id = (get-vm | ? {$_.name -eq "$vmname"} | select id).id.guid
  If ($id) {write-host "VM GUID found: $id"}
  Else {write-warning "VM or GUID not found for VM: $vmname"; break}
  $vm_pid = (Get-WmiObject Win32_Process | ? {$_.Name -match 'vmwp' -and $_.CommandLine -match $id}).ProcessId
  If ($vm_pid) {write-host "Found VM worker process id: $vm_pid"}
  Else {write-warning "No VM worker process found for VM: $vmname"}
  Write-host "Killing VM worker process of VM: $vmname"
  stop-process $vm_pid -Force
}

Have fun!