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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:

  1. Log on to the service console as root.
  2. 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:

  1. 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.
  2. Reboot the ESX Server system.
  3. Power on the virtual machines.

Keywords

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Actions
  • KB Article: 1987
  • Updated: Aug 14, 2009
  • Products:
    VMware ESX
  • Product Versions:
    VMware ESX 2.1.x
    VMware ESX 2.5.x