VMWare ESX(i) Could not power on...

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We run most of our servers on some sort of virtual environment. Be it XEN or VMWare ESX(i). This has proofed to be a very cost effective way to fully leverage each machine’s CPU and RAM.

In any case, the other day we had to adjust some RAM settings for one of the virtual servers. After setting the RAM and restarting the machine we got an error message saying;

“Could not power on vm: no space left on device”

You can imagine, that we were totally shocked as this was a customer server and time was running out. So, the only cause of this could be that VMWare must have some problems with the expanded RAM.

As it turns out, the solution to this was quite simple. VMWare adjusts the SWAP file and in our case, there was no more space left on the drive that this virtual machine was running on. So, if you are prompted with this message you should go into the general server configuration and adjust the SWAP location. Then adjust it as well in your individual virtual machine environment.

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