Cannot power on a virtual machine from VMware Infrastructure Client because of low disk space

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• You cannot power on a virtual machine from VMware Infrastructure (VI) Client
• If you try to power on the virtual machine, you see an error indicating that the virtual machine cannot be connected in VI client
• The virtual machine does not list when you run the command:
  
  vmware-cmd -l
  
  
• You may see the error:
  
  There was an error connecting to the specified virtual machine: Unexpected response from vmware-authd: The process exited with an error:
  Cannot make directory /var/run/vmware/VMAdmin/27197: No space left on device
  Failed to initialize the VMX VMDB instance

Environment

VMware ESX Server 3.0.x
VMware ESX 4.0.x
VMware ESX Server 3.5.x
VMware ESX 4.1.x

Resolution

This issue may occur if the root partition is full.

You must empty space in the root partition. For more information, Investigating disk space on an ESX/ESXi host (1003564).