Can’t stop the VM in Proxmox? We can help you do it.

Are you looking for a way to stop a virtual machine in Proxmox from the web interface and CLI? You have come to the right place!

Here at Bobcares, we often receive requests regarding Proxmox as a part of our Server Management Services.

Today, let’s see how our Support Engineers stop a VM in Proxmox.

Proxmox can’t stop VM – How we fix it!

Proxmox is a popular open-source virtualization platform. It lets users manage virtual machines and containers. However, sometimes users may run into issues when trying to stop a VM in Proxmox.

Today, we will take a close look at how to stop a VM in Proxmox in these cases. We will be exploring how to stop the VM from the web interface as well as the command-line interface (CLI).

Stop VM in Proxmox from the web interface

To stop the virtual machine from the web interface, follow these steps:

1. First, log in to the Proxmox web interface.
2. Then, click on the VM we want to stop.
3. After that, click Stop.

Force shutdown Proxmox VM in CLI

This will start the process of stopping the selected VM from the Proxmox web interface.

If the above steps do not work, it may be because we have another “Shutdown” or “Reboot” pending. In this case, we need to cancel that in the task log seen at the bottom).

If that still doesn’t work, we may have to manually kill the KVM process. For more details, see Proxmox shutdown from the command line.

Stop VM in Proxmox from CLI

To stop the VM from the CLI, follow these steps:

1. Open a terminal on the host node where the VM is running.
2. Run this command to list all VMs and their corresponding IDs. This will help us identify the VMID of the VM you want to stop.

   cat /etc/pve/.vmlist 
3. Once we get the ID, use the following command to stop the virtual machine.

   qm stop <vmid>

   For example, if the VMID is 103, we can run

   qm stop 103

   This command will initiate the process of stopping the specified VM. If you’re dealing with LXC containers instead of KVM VMs, you may want to list LXC containers in Proxmox to find the correct ID.

How can we fix the Proxmox cannot stop VM issue?

Recently, one of our customers contacted us, saying they were not able to stop the VM. Now let’s discuss how our Support Engineers fix the error for our customers.

VM locked

One of the common reasons for ‘can’t stop a VM’ is that the virtual machine might have been locked. This typically occurs when we attempt to stop a virtual machine while a backup is in progress.

So the VM locks itself to complete the backup process. Thus, we can wait for the backup process to delete the VM. Else, we can unlock the virtual machine and stop the VM.

We can use the following command to check if the VM is locked. This can help determine if the VM is locked due to a running backup or another process.

fuser /var/lock/qemu-server/lock-<VMID>.conf

To unlock the VM, follow these steps:

1. Open a terminal on the host node where the VM is running.
2. Then, use the following command to list all VMs and their corresponding IDs. This will help us identify the VMID of the VM we want to unlock.

    cat /etc/pve/.vmlist
3. Then, use this command followed by the VMID to unlock the VM.

    qm unlock

Thus, we fix the error.

For cases where QEMU-related issues arise, verifying the Proxmox QEMU agent setup can also help avoid communication problems between the VM and the host.

Timeout error

The timeout error occurs when the virtual machine is locked or the process is still running in the background.

If the virtual machine is locked, we unlock the VM and stop the VM.

Otherwise, we log in to the Host node.

Then we find the PID of the Machine process using the command.

ps aux | grep "/usr/bin/kvm -id VMID"

Once we find the PID, we kill the process using the command.

kill -9 PID

In case multiple VMs or services are affected, it might also be worth restarting cluster-related services. Learn how to restart Proxmox cluster services safely.

FAQs

Q. How do I delete a VM in Proxmox?

First, log in to the web UI, select the VM from the resource tree, and click Shutdown if it’s running. Then, right-click and choose “Remove” to delete it.

Q. What is the shutdown timeout in Proxmox?

It’s the time Proxmox waits after sending a shutdown command. Its default value is 180 seconds.

Q. How do I stop a QEMU VM?

In graphical mode, press `Ctrl + Alt + 2`, then type `quit`. On the other hand, in the non-graphical mode, run `pkill qemu` in a terminal.

Q. Why does my VM keep shutting down?

It may be due to auto-shutdown settings triggered by inactivity.

[Need any further assistance with Proxmox? – We’ll help you.

Conclusion

In this article, our Support Engineers have covered various methods for stopping a VM in Proxmox, including both web interface and CLI options.

We have also discussed common issues that may arise, such as a locked VM or a timeout error, and provided step-by-step instructions on how to troubleshoot and fix these problems.