At some point my Windows based VMWare Server server run out of disk space where couple of important production virtual machines were running. Windows started to complain about low disk space and I had only 32KB space left. I tried to open VMWare Server console and I got the error message below “511 vmware-serverd service is not running.” All virtual machines were running except the one which consumed the remaining disk space.

To solve this issue I had to:

• Shut down one of the virtual machines by using remote desktop connection.
• Move the virtual machine directory to another VMWare Server host
• Bring other virtual machines down by using remote desktop connection. At some point I could not shut down two remaining virtual machines. Both were not accessible by RDP and SSH for the linux one

I opened Task Manager and located the remaining processes for the virtual machines.

vmware-vmx.exe is an individual process for each of the virtual machines. Two were left and I stopped both vmware-vmx.exe processes. I opened Services.msc console and I then restart the “VMware Registration Service” service.

After the service was restarted power on task started. All virtual machines were up and running. Killing the process and moving some directories solved the problem with my VMWare Server.

This event brings me back to the root cause of why this happened. One of the import things I learned is to size your virtual machines and their disk space. I am going to implement thresholds and notifications with CactiEZ appliance soon.