[VMware] Could not start VMX: msg.vmk.status.VMK_NO_MEMORY

Last week I had some issues with starting virtual machines on vSphere 5.5 hosts (enough capacity available), when I try to start up the VM I receive message:

Could not start VMX: msg.vmk.status.VMK_NO_MEMORY”

An error was received from the ESX host while powering on VM [name]
Head globalCartel-1 already at its maximum size of 7869288. Cannot expand
Could not start VMX: msg.vmk.status.VMK_NO_MEMORY

Cause

This issue is caused by a memory leak in the driver which fills the SWAP memory of the ESXi host, making it unable to response to any requests at all. This issue occurs with ESXi hosts running on HP hardware with these versions of AMS:

hp-ams 500.9.6.0-12.434156
hp-ams-550.9.6.0-12.1198610
hp-ams 500.10.0.0-18.434156
hp-ams-550.10.0.0-18.1198610

Solution

This is a known issue affecting ESXi 5.x. To resolve this issue, upgrade to AMS version 10.0.1.

For ESXi 5.0 and 5.1, see:

HP Agentless Management Service Offline Bundle for VMware ESXi 5.0 and vSphere 5.1.

For ESXi 5.5, see:

Note: In some cases, commands running on the ESXi host fails with cant’t fork. In this case the virtual machines running on the ESXi host needs to be powered off and the ESXi host rebooted. To verify the installed versions of AMS, run this command:

esxcli software vib list | grep ams

To remove the package on all hosts running on these AMS versions:

Log in to the host using SSH. For more information, see Using ESXi Shell in ESXi 5.x and 6.0 (2004746).
Run this command to stop the HP service (does not persist on reboot):
/etc/init.d/hp-ams.sh stop
Run this command to remove the VIB:
esxcli software vib remove -n hp-ams
Reboot the host.

More information:

VMware

About Author

Sander

Sander Daems is founder and author of this blog and working as a Lead (Sr.) Consultant / Technical Project Lead at Unica ICT Solutions. Sander has 15+ years experience in IT, primary focus: virtualization, security and modern worksplace.

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