Error: "Admission check failed for memory resource" powering on a virtual machine

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• Cannot power on the virtual machine
• Powering on the virtual machine fails
• You see the errors similar to:
  • Failed to power on VM
  • Could not power on VM : Admission check failed for memory resource See the VMware ESX Resource Management Guide for information on resource management settings.
  • Group vm.3582: Invalid memory allocation parameters for VM vmm0:New_Virtual_Machine. (min: 524288, max: -1, minLimit: -1, shares: -1, units: pages)
  • Group vm.13327: Cannot admit VM: Memory admission check failed. Requested reservation: 311199 pages

Environment

• VMware ESX 4.0.x
• VMware ESX 4.1.x
• VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0
• VMware ESXi 4.1.x Installable
• VMware ESXi 4.1.x Embedded
• VMware ESXi 4.0.x Installable
• VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1
• VMware ESXi 4.0.x Embedded

Cause

This issue occurs when:

• User or Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) have assigned limited resource to a resource pool.
• Virtual machine's host does not have enough memory for the reservation required.
• Virtual machine's resource usage does not match its resource settings.

Note: You must have available memory for any memory reservations you have set for the virtual machine and the overhead memory. 

Resolution

• Increase the resource allocation for the resource pool. 
• Reduce permitted reservations for an virtual machine. 
• If applicable, remove VMDirectPath devices from the virtual machine. Adding a VMDirectPath device to a virtual machine sets memory reservation to the memory size of the virtual machine.
• Increase physical host resources, such as memory.