How to hard reset a VM if it’s locked up

Overview

While extremely rare, sometimes Virtual Machines (VM’s) can stop responding completely and need a hard reset (or hard stop) before they become operational again.

Warning: This is only a last resort where the console is completely unresponsive and the VM is unresponsive via Plesk and ping. Following these steps on a working VM may result in data loss.

Instructions

1. Login to the Conetix Control Panel.
2. Find the affected service (it should have Proxmox Cloud VM or similar in the product name) and open up the detail page:
   
3. Ping the IP address to confirm the VM is unresponsive. If you get results, do not continue with the hard stop below as it may result in data loss.
4. Open up the noVNC Console:
   
5. This should open a new window. For a functional VM, you should be able to hit <Enter> and see a login prompt appear for a working system:
   
   (kpatch messages may also appear in the console and this is expected behaviour)
6. If pressing <Enter> within the console does NOT result in a login prompt AND pings aren’t returning, then it’s very likely the VM has become completely unresponsive and therefore won’t shutdown nor reboot.
7. Select Stop as the action:
   
   (This is equivalent to pulling the power plug so it’s only for completely unresponsive systems)
8. This will ask you to confirm the Stop command:
   
9. Click Confirm and it will issue the stop command to our clustered system.
10. Confirm via the status of the VM that it has completely stopped:
    
    (You may need to refresh the page for the status to update)
11. With the VM stopped, we can now issue the Start command:
    
12. This will again confirm you wish to start the VM:
    
13. Click Confirm. Wait 60 seconds for the command to fully go through.
14. Monitor the boot process via the noVNC console to ensure it starts correctly and you should also test pinging the server.

If the issue is during business hours, please don’t hesitate to contact us for a confirmation in regards to any issue with your services and to have us perform any hard reset on your behalf.