Unable to increase VMFS datastore when the datastore is full

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Increasing the VMFS datastore size from vSphere Client or vCenter Server fails with the error:
  
  Error during the configuration of the host
  
  
• Increasing the VMFS datastore size on the ESX or ESXi host using vmfstools -G command fails with the error:
  
  Error: No space left on device
  
  
• Partition layout of the physical LUN indicates the VMFS partition has been increased to the new size, but the total capacity of the datastore is still shown as the old size.
  
  
• The vmkernel.log contains entries similar to:
  
  May 11 15:45:39 vmkernel: 54:00:07:58.132 cpu23:7128484)LVM: 7048: No unused capacity on device naa.6090a088402f28123da931010000a0ed:1
  May 11 15:45:39 vmkernel: 54:00:07:58.133 cpu23:7128484)LVM: 6963: Error adding space (0) on device naa.6090a088402f28123da931010000a0ed:1 to volume 4d41db12-########-####-##########a7: Underlying device has no free space

Insufficient-disk-space-on-datastore disk-space no-space-left-on-device

Resolution

This issue occurs when the datastore is completely full. To grow existing VMFS datastores, space is needed to update filesystem metadata.

To resolve this issue, delete some files to free up a some disk space.

These are a few ways to quickly free up disk space:

• Shutdown running virtual machines located on the datastore. This causes the virtual machine swap files to be deleted.

• Manually delete unused files (for example, core-dumps, iso images).