On Proxmox, sometimes a VM refuses to shut down. It’s quite annoying, so here’s the ultimate solution: the “kill -9” of the VM’s PID.

Of course, there are gentler methods before resorting to this, but let’s not get into details!

Start by opening the shell of your Proxmox host server hosting the VM or connect via SSH to it.

We’ll proceed in 3 steps

Retrieve the VMID of our VM

Find the PID corresponding to the VMID

Kill the VM using the PID

The VMID corresponds to the number of your VM, in the left menu of Proxmox next to each of your VMs. (usually 101, 102 etc…)

For the example, we’ll take the VM with VMID 101

Now let’s identify the PID with a little ps aux

ps aux | grep "/usr/bin/kvm -id 101"

root       18109  216 25.7 9947724 8445000      

With the output of our command, we’ve just retrieved the PID of the VM.

For our VM, the PID is 18109 (the first block of numbers)

All that’s left is to kill our VM to shut it down.

kill -9 18109

And there you have it! Problem solved, after a few seconds the VM should be shut down.