Symptoms: virtual system cannot be poweredoff from the vCenter or ESXi ui console.

Cause:

So, you have just checked that there is no communication between vCenter or inside ESXi between services. From ESXi shell you are getting “connection failed” with esxcli and other commands.

This can be caused by ADP of some datastore connectivity problem (as I saw this several time) or internal disk issues.

Most of the time operation on ESXi and virtual systems from ESXi CLI are done with esxcli command like the below – which in this situation you would probably do to stop system and register VM on other host.

esxcli vm process list

esxcli vm process kill -w <numer world-id>

Above commands can failed with information: “connection failed”.

In such situation you can use the following command, which probably will also fail:

vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms
vim-cmd vmsvc/power.shutdown vmid
vim-cmd vmsvc/power.off vmid

So administrator can feel unarmed without above powerful command.

In such case you can use the following command

localcli vm process list
localcli vm process kill --world-id 74431 --type force

other parameters:
soft = prefer this if you want to shut down “softly”
hard = equal to an immediate shutdown
force = hard kill of the VM

Please keep in mind that using localcli command will not necessarily update all vmware services (files etc.) For such reason using localcli command shouldn’t be yours first choice.