Q: I’m trying to evacuate a machine that is suffering a hardware failure, and one of the VMs thinks it is installing the VMware Tools, so it won’t VMotion. The error is “The virtual machine is installing VMware Tools and cannot initiate a migration operation.” I also cannot right-click the VM in vCenter and choose “End VMware Tools Install.” Is there a way for me to end the VMware Tools installation from the ESX command line?
A: Yes, it’s a two-step process once you’ve logged into the console OS of the ESX server where the VM is executing.
First, you need the ID of the VM (all on one line if it wraps):
/usr/bin/vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/datastore-name/vm-folder/vmx-file.vmx getid
Then you can do a:
/usr/bin/vmware-vim-cmd vmsvc/tools.cancelinstall idnumber
Have fun!