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Have you tried to bypass Virtual Center and access the web interface of the ESX host directly? &nbsp;i.e. &nbsp;https://esx1.mydomain.com<br />
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See if you can down the guest VM from there. &nbsp;This has worked for me in the past.
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I already tried that and the host does not respond to <a href="https://hostname" rel="ugc">https://hostname</a>. Other ESX servers do respond to <a href="https://hostname" rel="ugc">https://hostname</a>.
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Can you try via the IP address of the ESX host? &nbsp;<br />
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Is your host operating normally otherwise?<br />

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I tried by IP as well as hostname. Putty still works but it will not process the service mgmt-vmware stop &nbsp;command.
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We have an ESX 3.5 guest (The guest is running Linux Cent OS) that will bot respond to any command in virtual center 2.5. All other guests can be controlled normally. The guest in question can not be powered off nor can the console for it be opoened. When you try to do either of those the attempt is made but after a few minutes you get an error message: 'Unable to contact the specified host. This might be because the host is not available on the network, there's a network configuration problem, or the management services on the host are not responding'.<br />
I also tried to stop the Vmware mgmt service using: service mgmt-vmware stop but that just hangs and never finishes. Rebooting the host is not an option. Ultimately I just want to power off the guest in question and delete it.<br />
Thanks for any help.<br />

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We have an ESX 3.5 guest (The guest is running Linux Cent OS) that will bot respond to any command in virtual center 2.5. All other guests can be controlled normally. The guest in question can not be powered off nor can the console for it be opoened. When you try to do either of those the attempt is made but after a few minutes you get an error message: 'Unable to contact the specified host. This might be because the host is not available on the network, there's a network configuration problem, or the management services on the host are not responding'.
I also tried to stop the Vmware mgmt service using: service mgmt-vmware stop but that just hangs and never finishes. Rebooting the host is not an option. Ultimately I just want to power off the guest in question and delete it.
Thanks for any help.


ESX 3.5 guest will not respond

VMware, a software company founded in 1998,  was one of the first commercially successful companies to offer x86 virtualization. The storage company EMC purchased VMware in 1994. Dell Technologies acquired EMC in 2016. VMware’s parent company is now Dell Technologies.

VMware has many software products that run on desktops, Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS, which allows the virtualizing of the x86 architecture.  Its enterprise software hypervisor for servers, VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi), is a bare-metal hypervisor that runs directly on the server hardware and does not require an additional underlying operating system.