A recent clear out of old vms had an impact on the performance of an sbs 2011 virtual machine. The plan had been to remove the old vms and free up some space on the esx. However it deletion process left behind several large files from rather old vms and when the server disk size grew – the datastore reached the point where there was njo more space to honour the increase in size of the vm.
The solutionobviously is to free up the space by removing the remnants of the deleted vms. I can only assume that some prevented the removal as in many cases it was a single file left behind. In one case it was an iso image that was still mounted by a virtual machine and had to be unmounted before deletion.
The moral here is don’t assume that vmware actual cleans up after itself and regularly check the datastore folders for redundant files – this may save you issues with virtual machines stopped midstream – or worse.