Quickie #4: How to kill a frozen VMware Tools installation

Here's another annoying thing - stuck VMware Tools installation.

You never know when it's gonna hit you, but oh boy - we gonna hit it back fast.

1. The Scenario 

After launching the installation of VMware Tools on a VM, it goes for a while and never finishes. Sometimes this means the installation also never starts/finishes on guest OS, but that's not always the case. Fortunately getting rid of the annoying "in progress" message in vCenter/ESXi is not really hard and can be done in two easy steps. You can restart the installation of VMware Tools afterwards.

2. The Solution 

Before we get started, make sure you have enabled SSH access on ESXi host running the affected VM: KB Article

Here's how to kill the VMware Tools installation process:
1. Connect to ESXi host as root
2. Run the following command (remember to substitute vm_name with the actual name of the VM):
vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms | grep "vm_name" 
3. Note down the ID process number on the left

4. Run this command to kill the installation process (replace id_number with the actual ID you found by running the previous command):
vim-cmd vmsvc/tools.cancelinstall id_number

3. The Conclusion

This was simple, wasn't it? As I wrote in the scenario, sometimes after killing the process you might find the VM had already installed VMware Tools successfully or that the installation has never started. In the latter case you can freely start it again. Let's just hope it will finish this time and you won't have to come back to this post again.