Virtual Machines Won't Start on an ESX Server System After Root Partition Is Filled
Details
You have ESX Server 2.5 running on a machine that ran out of disk space. After you recovered the disk space, no virtual machines start on this server.
Some error messages you might see include:
Failed to power on the VM. See the virtual machine event log for details.
The event logs says:
Operation failed to change the VM to the expected power state.
Running vmware-cmd start from service console reports:
(VMControl error -15: Protocol error: Malformed response from server)
Solution
The configuration file /etc/vmware/config can become corrupted when the root partition runs out of free space. If the file is corrupted, the virtual machines cannot start.
To verify that a corrupted configuration file is the problem:
Log on to the service console as root.
Look at the configuration file (cat /etc/vmware/config). If the file is blank or only has one line, it is corrupted.
To resolve this problem:
Copy a backed-up version of /etc/vmware/config to the system that contains the corrupted file. If you do not have a backup, you may also copy the file from another similar ESX Server system.
