How to Kill a Frozen Parallels Virtual Machine

Multiple projects have me using Windows more than I’m accustomed to, so I picked up a copy of Parallels and Windows Vista and loaded them up on the MacBook Pro.

My relationship with the MacBook Pro has been trying these past few weeks. Like an aged sitcom introducing a new character – this recent addition isn’t helping.

I found myself with a frozen Vista shutdown this afternoon, and for my own future reference here’s how to terminate a frozen Parallels Virtual Machine (from Parallels knowledgebase)


ps auxwww | grep prl


And grab the processes UUID of the process containing prl_vm_app and curly brackets (it’ll be obvious – especially if you’re only running one virtual machine)

Then

sudo kill [The VM's UUID]


Easy.