Tip: Force a Virtual Machine to Power Off
If you've ever used a computer and had it freeze or otherwise lock up, you may have had to pull the power cord, either literally or by holding the power button. But how do you do this for a virtual machine?
In the Virtual Machine menu, there are of course power commands: Shut Down Guest, Suspend Guest, and Restart Guest. However, these are what are known as soft power commands - they're requests to the guest OS, which it can ignore (or in the case of a deadlocked guest, might not be able to handle). In contrast, hard power options are not ignorable by the guest - it's the virtual equivalent of yanking the power cord. To get these hard power options, hold down the option key on the Virtual Machine menu to change the power commands to Power Off, Suspend, and Reset.
Obligatory note of caution: Just like with a physical computer, you risk corrupting the contents of the (virtual) disk if the guest OS isn't in a quiesced state.
Side note: Some virtual machines have the default options switched (i.e. hard power options by default, and pressing the option key changes to soft power options).
Bonus tip: Holding down the option key to get alternate menu items is used in other Mac applications - for example, try it in Finder.
Just wanted you to know that VMWare Tools for VMWare Fusion 2.0 does not work well at all with Ubuntu 8.10 beta (wrong display sizes, mouse is not recognized at all, etc).
Posted by: Pseudonymous Coward | October 11, 2008 at 08:22 AM
This is a very useful tip. Thank you!
Posted by: Onyx Mueller | October 13, 2008 at 07:03 AM
Great tip, I searched for quite a while before finding this.
Posted by: Brian | January 13, 2009 at 05:33 PM
Great tip!
Posted by: Ryan | March 02, 2009 at 04:14 PM
Thank you much, you saved me opening up a trouble ticket with VMware support
Posted by: Paul | March 03, 2009 at 01:54 PM
Thanks. This happened to me when Windows Update did an automatic restart while I left the room with programs running. Lacking this info, I ended up restoring the virtual machine from backup. A forced power off is obviously more elegant.
Posted by: EVAN APPELMAN | August 28, 2009 at 04:54 PM
This is a helpful tip, SINCE IT IS AN OTHERWISE INVISIBLE FUNCTION, and not easily found in the VMWare help files. This is canonically bad UI design, regardless of wherever else this approach is used. For goodness's sake, when this is necessary, the customer is already frustrated - why make it more difficult? If necessary, require an extra step of confirmation, but for the love of pete, make it an obvious option that doesn't require hunting around for internet tips!
Posted by: Dan Phillips | September 28, 2009 at 11:36 AM
Agree with Dan Phillips above!!! I've needed this tip for quite some time. It's quite irritating when the software thinks it's smarter than the user.
Posted by: Doug | October 08, 2009 at 07:25 AM
Great tip. Thanks
Posted by: Rushabh | October 26, 2009 at 07:47 AM