Use the fail-tasks command of the cell management tool to update the completion status associated with tasks that were running when the cell was deliberately shut down. You cannot use the fail-tasks command unless all cells have been shut down.

When you quiesce a cell using the cell-management-tool -q command, running tasks should terminate gracefully within a few minutes. If tasks continue to run on a cell that has been quiesced, the superuser can shut down the cell, which forces any running tasks to fail. After a shutdown that forced running tasks to fail, the superuser can run cell-management-tool fail-tasks to update the completion status of those tasks. Updating a task's completion status in this way is optional but helps maintain the integrity of system logs by clearly identifying failures caused by an administrative action.

To generate a list of tasks that are still running on a quiesced cell, use a command line with the following form: 
cell-management-tool -u sysadmin-username cell --status-verbose
Table 1. Cell Management Tool Options and Arguments, fail-tasks Subcommand
Command Argument Description
--help (-h) None Provides a summary of available commands in this category.
--message (-m) Message text. Message text to place in task completion status.

Fail Tasks Running on the Cell

This example updates the task completion status associated with a task that was still running when the cell was shut down. 
[root@cell1 /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin]# ./cell-management-tool fail-tasks -m "administrative shutdown"
Operation: IMPORT_SINGLETON_VAPP, Start time: 12/16/13 6:41 PM, Username: system, Organization: org1
Would you like to fail the tasks listed above?
Type y to update the task with a completion status of administrative shutdown. Type n to allow the task to continue running.
Note: If multiple tasks are returned in the response, you must decide to fail all of them or take no action. You cannot choose a subset of tasks to fail.