Sometimes you come across a VM that thinks it still is installing VMware Tools and you cannot vMotion or Storage vMotion this VM. Yet the option to cancel the installation is greyed out from the GUI menu and you may not even have the option to edit the VM settings.
How do you kill this installation that seems to be in limbo?
On the host that is running the VM you will need to enable RemoteTech Support mode or SSH and then login using a SSH client such as Putty.
From the command line you then run the following command:
vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms
This will give you a list of all currently running VMs and their ID
With this information you then execute the following:
vim-cmd vmsvc/tools.cancelinstall vmid where vmid is the number you got from the previous list that matches the VM you are working with.
This kills the VMware Tools installation instance on that VM. This will let you vMotion the VM to another host. Since the installation is cancelled you will need to verify if VMware tools installation had been successful or retry the installation.