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.

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

Stop VM in Proxmox from CLI

To stop the VM from 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 start the process of stopping the specified VM

How can we fix 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 usually happens when we try to stop a virtual machine when a backup is running.

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.

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

Thus, the VM will stop.

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

Conclusion

In this article, our Support Engineers have covered different ways to stop a VM in Proxmox, both from the web interface and the CLI.

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.