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jason331
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Unable To Power On New VMs

Hi everyone,

I'm running ESXi 5.1.0 (1483097) on a Dell PowerEdge T300 with 24GB of RAM and a couple of terabytes of HDD space. I have a 64GB SSD set as my default swap file location. I am unable to power on any newly-created VMs on this server (only has a handful of other VMs running on it currently, no more than 4-8GB RAM each). When I attempt to power on any new VM I get the following error:

An error was received from the ESX host while powering on VM <vmname>.

Failed to power on VM.

Could not power on VM : Out of resources.

Failed to extend swap file from 32768 KB to 93504 KB.

Failed to extend swap file from 32768 KB to 94208 KB.

There's plenty of free RAM available and I do not have any reservations set in my only resource pool that all the VMs live under. I've tried setting the VM swap file location to the VM's datastore but that has no effect. Any ideas?

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Alistar
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Hi there,

you are indeed running out of space on your swap destination - you have only 56MB free space on your SSD. You are also out of space for swap on datastore1 and 4. I suggest checking it and removing any unneeded data. Please note that by default with no reservations, the VM creates a swapfile that equals the size of RAM allocated to it. If the bootup is failing with swap on your other hard drive, try vMotioning or cold-migrating the VM to another storage. Also you could do much better with the spare space by consolidating all your storages to a single VMFS volume.

Stop by my blog if you'd like :slightly_smiling_face: I dabble in vSphere troubleshooting, PowerCLI scripting and NetApp storage - and I share my journeys at http://vmxp.wordpress.com/

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Alistar
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Hi there,

you are indeed running out of space on your swap destination - you have only 56MB free space on your SSD. You are also out of space for swap on datastore1 and 4. I suggest checking it and removing any unneeded data. Please note that by default with no reservations, the VM creates a swapfile that equals the size of RAM allocated to it. If the bootup is failing with swap on your other hard drive, try vMotioning or cold-migrating the VM to another storage. Also you could do much better with the spare space by consolidating all your storages to a single VMFS volume.

Stop by my blog if you'd like :slightly_smiling_face: I dabble in vSphere troubleshooting, PowerCLI scripting and NetApp storage - and I share my journeys at http://vmxp.wordpress.com/
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jason331
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Yep, that was indeed the problem. I changed the default VM swapfile location back to the default of "Virtual machine directory" and now I'm able to power up the new VMs again. How can I clean off that SSD so I can eventually use it as swap? That's my ultimate goal here.

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jason331
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Nevermind, I answered my own question. I had the host cache set to the SSD as well. Time to go back and reconfigure a few things...