vSphere Virtual Machine Power On Stuck at 95%

Today I got a support call where the customer had a file server virtual machine that would not startup and every time they try to power it on it would get stuck at 95% and it would pop an error that the VMX file is not accessible.

This VM had a datastore on its own, all other VMs running on other datastores were running normally without any issues which made me suspect the storage directly.

Accessing the datastore to list its content was ver…rrr..yyy….sll…oooo..www ;-), removing the VM and re-adding it to the inventory just kept getting us to the same result.

Finally I had to barge it and look into the storage (although it was not mine to look at) but I couldn’t bare sitting there, it was a NetApp storage and the volume was thin provisioned and TADA the logs were showing that the volume was full.

So the ESXi host was trying to get more storage and the array wouldn’t allow it because it couldn’t provide anymore, after increasing the capacity of the volume the virtual machine returned back to normal without any issues.

So as I have said always and I will repeat it again, poorly administering thin provisioning could/will lead to catastrophes, please make sure you always configure alarms on your vCenter to reflect the increase of your data and compare it to the reports from your storage, otherwise just go with thick-provisioning :-).

Thank you for your time,
(Abdullah)^2