How to deal with unresponsive windows service, like vCenter svc

You might have seen this, where you tried to restart a windows service and it got stuck on stopping or in some cases starting. Recently same thing happened with me when tried to restart vCenter service, it got stuck on stopping service.

Here what we can do is, first note down the service name by going to its properties,

Here for vCenter service its ‘vpxd’

Now open windows command prompt in elevated mode and run this cmd,

C:\> sc queryex vpxd 

This will give show you the detailed info/status of intended service, note down the PID of respective service.

        SERVICE_NAME: vpxd
        TYPE               : 10  WIN32_OWN_PROCESS
        STATE              : 3  STOP_PENDING
                                (STOPPABLE, NOT_PAUSABLE, ACCEPTS_SHUTDOWN)
        WIN32_EXIT_CODE    : 0  (0x0)
        SERVICE_EXIT_CODE  : 0  (0x0)
        CHECKPOINT         : 0x0
        WAIT_HINT          : 0x493e0
        PID                : 4061
        FLAGS              :

Now run this cmd,

C:/> taskkill /f /pid xxxx

Here the PID is 4061 so,

C:/> taskkill /f /pid 4061

this will terminate the service immediately, once done then you can start the service either from GUI (services console) or from cmd itself by running this command, 

C:/> sc start vpxd

That’s it... :)