I had a coworker run into an interesting VMware issue today and wanted to share.
The Problem
We had a VM that was ‘frozen’ it showed that it was running but it was not responding. After trying to force restart the VM with no luck he went looking for a solution.
The Solution
Because this was in the production VMware environment we could not just reboot the host. The solution was found on the SysAdminHell Blog. The solution was in the first section of the article. The individual VM must be killed via the command shell of the host server.
The VMware community that Seth discusses in his post can be found here which also outlines the solution.
Just had the same issue, solution was to answer the question ESX was asking about the vm in the host console. Situation here was a timed-out migration initiated by DRS, left the vm state indeterminate. ESX needed user input.
We were not asked to give user input in our situation but I can see how a DRS initiated migration could cause the issue that you had. What version of ESX/Vsphere are you using?