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Cannot power on a hosted virtual machine

Symptoms

You may experience any of these symptoms:
  • You cannot power on a virtual machine.
  • Some virtual machine operations are greyed out and unavailable.
  • You see one of these error messages:
    • This file is required to power on this virtual machine. If this file was moved, please provide its new location.
    • Unable to open file.
    • File not found.
    • The handle is invalid.
    • The virtual machine is already powered on.
    • Insufficient permissions.
    • No permission to access this virtual machine.
    • This ACE cannot contact its ACE Management Server. Check your network connection and try again.

Purpose

This document guides you through the process of troubleshooting being unable to power on a virtual machine. It helps you eliminate common causes for your problem by verifying that the virtual machine is healthy, that there are sufficient resources and permissions to power it on, and that there is nothing wrong with the host on which it is located.

Resolution

Each step below provides instructions and a link to a document, for performing the step and taking corrective action as necessary. The steps are ordered in the most appropriate sequence to isolate the issue and to identify the proper resolution. They are also ordered in the most appropriate sequence to minimize data loss. Work through each troubleshooting step in order, and do not skip a step.

Note: If you perform a corrective action in any of the following steps, attempt powering on the virtual machine again.
  1. Confirm that the virtual machine cannot power on. In some cases, a virtual machine may be powered on but it is not obvious. For more information, see Investigating if a hosted virtual machine is powered on (1003844). Additionally, there are times when one method of powering on a virtual machine does not work but another method does. For more information, see Powering on a hosted virtual machine (1003845).

  2. Confirm that you are trying to power on the correct virtual machine. You may be powering on a virtual machine that does not actually correspond to the virtual machine that you are trying to work with. The listed location of the virtual machine shows where the virtual machine is stored.

  3. Confirm that the virtual machine hardware version is compatible with the new host. For more information, see Virtual machine hardware versions (1003746).

  4. Confirm that the virtual machine is compatible with the new host architecture. For more information, see Troubleshooting host architecture incompatibility (1003747).

  5. Confirm that the virtual machine files and directory are accessible. For more information, see Verifying that hosted virtual machine storage is accessible (1003858).

  6. Confirm that there is no virtual machine file corruption. For more information, see Verifying hosted virtual machine file integrity (1003846).

  7. Confirm that there are sufficient permissions for you to power on the virtual machine. For more information, see Investigating power on permissions for hosted virtual machines (1003847).

If this is an ACE instance set to use an ACE Management Server (AMS):

  1. Verify that the AMS is available. For more information, see Checking connectivity to an ACE Management Server (1003851).

  2. Verify the integrity of the third party CA SSL certificate. For more information, see Validating the integrity of an ACE Management Server third party CA SSL certificate (1017398).
Note: If your problem still exists after trying the steps in this article:

See Also

This Article Replaces

1003669
1003670
1003672

Update History

01/17/2011 - Merged with KBs 1003669, 1003670, and 1003672 06/22/2011 - re-did all links to relative links as the second internal link was broken - kadamson

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