VM Powers on and Abruptly Powers Off

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• When you power on the virtual machine it starts to boot and then powers off.
• While troubleshooting you can see a notification in the vmware.log file stating VMAutomationPowerOff: Powering off. There are no additional indicators such as guest os initiated shutdown, panic, or triple fault.
  
  

  In(05) vmx - Vix: [mainDispatch.c:####]: VMAutomationPowerOff: Powering off.

   
• From the UI you can see the vim.event.VmPoweredOffEvent with no entry listed in the User column to indicate who or what initiated the shutdown.
• VPXD and Hostd logs show the power on activity, but there is no corresponding power off event.
• The datastore is low on space and the VM is running on snapshots 

Environment

7.x

8.x

Cause

The hard drive of the guest operating system is out of space, and the guest OS is immediately shutting down to prevent data loss/corruption.

Resolution

There are two options:

• Boot the guest into recovery mode, delete files such as old log file to free up space, and then once you have some free space perform a normal boot.
• Expand the hard disk in the vSphere UI, and then refresh the disk inside the guest OS and expand the full partition. 

 

If the issue is as a result of low disk space on the datastore itself then the datastore size needs to be increased.

Additional Information

Some recovery mode partitions may require you to change the boot option on the guest from BIOS to UEFI and then back after remediation.

Some recovery modes will also require you to change your SCSI controller type from paravirtual to LSI Logic, in order to see the disk(s), and then back after remediation. For example, the recovery mode partition for Windows does not contain pvscsi drivers so will require you to change the controller from paravirtual to a type that default drivers are included for.

In some Linux recovery modes rm commands to delete files do not work. Using the command > truncate -s 0 <filename> will empty the contents of files effectively creating the necessary free space.