Powering on a virtual machine fails with the error: Admission check failed for memory resource

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

Resolution

This issue ocuurs 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. For more information on determining overhead memory requirements, see vSphere Resource Management section in the ESXi and vCenter Server 5.5 Documentation Guide.

To resolve this issue:

• Increase the resource allocation for the resource pool. For more information, see Powering on a virtual machine from within vCenter times out (1006017).
• Reduce permitted reservations for an virtual machine. For more information, see the vSphere Resource Management section in the ESXi and vCenter Server 5.5 Documentation Guide.
• 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. For more information, see the Configuring Resource Allocation Settings settings in the ESXi and vCenter Server 5.5 Documentation Guide.
• Increase physical host resources, such as memory.

Additional Information

For translated versions of this article, see:

• 日本語: 仮想マシンのパワーオンがエラー「Admission check failed for memory resource」で失敗する (2079231)
• 简体中文: 打开虚拟机电源失败，并显示以下错误：内存资源的接入检查失败 (2062666)