Use the fail-tasks command of the VMware Cloud Director 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.