Sometimes a virtual machine stops responding. In most cases due to vCenter ordered to erase a snapshot of the VM. If we open up vSphere Client and have a look at the window bottom, we will see in the task log pane the following message:

Removing previous Virtual Machine Snapshot

It is stuck at at 95% for ages. This has a fairly easy solution. Let’s open an ESXi console and run the following command:

service mgmt-vmware restart

This will trigger a management services restart in the affected ESXi hosts and hence 99.99999% of the times, VM will recover.