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Verifying sufficient free disk space for a hosted virtual machine
Symptoms
The virtual machine does not power on.
Taking a snapshot fails.
Suspending the virtual machine fails.
You may see one or more of these errors:
Check for missing files failed: Insufficient permissions.
Cannot open the disk or one of the snapshot disks it depends on.
The handle is invalid.
Error taking snapshot:
Failed to suspend the virtual machine.
There is not enough disk space to save the virtual machine's state.
Could not open paging file for 516 MB. No space left on device.
Could not power on VM; No space left on device. Failed to power on VM
Purpose
This article guides you through determining if problems that you are having with virtual machine operations are due to insufficient disk space. It also provides best practices for minimum disk space requirements for normal virtual machine operations.
Resolution
To be sure that insufficient disk space is not causing problems with virtual machine operations, confirm that:
You have as much free disk space as the amount of virtual memory assigned to your virtual machine. The host file system that requires this amount of disk space free is the one on which the configuration file of your virtual machine resides. For more information on determining the location of the .vmx file on the virtual machine, see Locating a hosted virtual machine's files (1003880).
You have as much free disk space as the difference between the amount of space being currently used by the virtual disk (.vmdk) files of all your virtual machines and the size of the virtual disks that you had defined for your virtual machine. To determine the current size of your virtual disks, locate your virtual machines .vmdk files. For more information, see Locating a hosted virtual machine's files (1003880).
Note: If you are using growable (not pre-allocated) virtual disks, the size of each virtual disk on its host file system starts off small and then gradually increase as more data is added to the guest operating system's file systems.
You have as much free disk space as the combined size of all of your virtual machine's virtual disks and the amount of virtual memory assigned to the virtual machine for each snapshot taken.
Note: Snapshots start off requiring only a small amount of disk space but the longer that they are used the more space they require. If they are used for a long time it is possible that they may require up to the amount of disk space that was defined for the virtual disk.
Note: For each virtual disk, free space requirements are on that virtual disk's host file system. For the virtual machine's virtual memory, free disk requirement are on the virtual machines configuration (.vmx) file host file system. For more information, see Locating a hosted virtual machine's files (1003880).
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