i had this issue today on 2 VMs 
the first i managed to shutdown and change the CPU limit to unlimited ok (the second I had to reboot host)
if you initiate a shutdown in VC the job will just fail, but if you initiate a reset or hard stop the job will hang (important).
if you follow this advice Unable to Power off a Virtual Machine in an ESXi host (1014165) (vmware.com)
then as long as there is a job queued to perform this action you should be ok.
otherwise if you kill the VM then you still can't power it off from the host and you have to evacuate all the other VMs on the host and reboot
(be careful if you have HA enabled as will failover with the same settings! i just managed to make the change before HA kicked in).