Verifying sufficient free disk space for a hosted virtual machine

Products

• VMware Desktop Hypervisor

Issue/Introduction

This article will help determine if insufficient disk space is causing issues with virtual machine operations and also provides best practices for minimum disk space requirements for normal virtual machine operations.

• The virtual machine does not power on.
• Taking a snapshot fails.
• Suspending the virtual machine fails.
• Plausible error messages:
  • Check for missing files failed: Insufficient permissions.
  • Cannot open the disk or one of the snapshot disks it depends on.
  • The handle is invalid.
  • Error taking snapshot:
  • Failed to suspend the virtual machine.
  • There is not enough disk space to save the virtual machine's state.
  • Could not open paging file for 516 MB. No space left on device.
  • Could not power on VM; No space left on device. Failed to power on VM

Resolution

Validate that each troubleshooting step below is true for the environment. Each step provides instructions or a link to a document, in order to eliminate possible causes and take corrective action as necessary. The steps are ordered in the most appropriate sequence to isolate the issue and identify the proper resolution. Do not skip a step.

To be sure that insufficient disk space is not causing problems with virtual machine operations, confirm that:

Note: To determine the amount of disk space currently free on a host file system, see Investigating operating system disk space

1. Have as much free disk space as the amount of virtual memory assigned to your virtual machine. The host file system that requires this amount of disk space free is the one on which the configuration file of the virtual machine resides. For more information on determining the location of the .vmx file on the virtual machine, see Locating a hosted virtual machine's files
   
   
2. Have as much free disk space as the difference between the amount of space being currently used by the virtual disk (.vmdk) files of all the virtual machines and the size of the virtual disks defined for the virtual machine. To determine the current size of the virtual disks, locate the virtual machines .vmdk files. For more information, see Locating a hosted virtual machine's files
   
   Note: If using growable (not pre-allocated) virtual disks, the size of each virtual disk on its host file system starts off small and then gradually increase as more data is added to the guest operating system's file systems.
   
   
3. Have as much free disk space as the combined size of all of the virtual machine's virtual disks and the amount of virtual memory assigned to the virtual machine for each snapshot taken.
   
   Notes:
   • Snapshots start off requiring only a small amount of disk space but the longer that they are used the more space they require. If they are used for a long time, it is possible that they may require up to the amount of disk space that was defined for the virtual disk.
   • For each virtual disk, free space requirements are on that virtual disk's host file system. For the virtual machine's virtual memory, free disk requirement is located in the virtual machines configuration (.vmx) file host file system.