---
# source: blog-content: posts/en/cannot-power-on-view-vms-after-deleting-resource-pools.md
# route:  /en/insights/cannot-power-on-view-vms-after-deleting-resource-pools/
title: Cannot power on VMs after deleting resource pools
date: 2017-07-27
author: dario-doerflinger
locale: en
summary: One of my colleagues had a problem the other night. He was called to troubleshoot a VMware View environment which was not running as expected.
capabilities: [modern-workplace, virtualization]
vendors: [omnissa, vmware]
series: lessons-learned
legacySlug: cannot-power-on-view-vms-after-deleting-resource-pools
migrated: 2026-08-24
draft: false
---

One of my colleagues had a problem the other night. He was called to troubleshoot a VMware View environment which was not running as expected. One thing he did during the cleaning up was to get rid of a number of resource pools that were only created for the purpose of putting the VMs into "folders" when viewed from the old C# Client.

After fixing other errors he was ready to create new linked clones. But they could not power on. The error message said:

> The available memory resources in the parent resource pool are insufficient for this operation

Turns out the hosts had a file in /etc/vmware which referred to the resource pools and was not properly cleaned up. In order to solve this problem the following had to be run on each esxi host:

> rm /etc/vmware/pools.xml  
> /etc/init.d/hostd restart  
> /etc/init.d/vpxa restart

After that the VMs were able to power-on as expected and the environment was up and running again.