[Labsy]

Hi,

I am newbie with ESX/ESXi, but despite of this fact I managed to setup ESXi 3.5 u2 for a customer and installed 2 Virtual Machines on it.
Now, after few months, we realised that initial 4 GB RAM and single NIC are not apropriate, so I upgraded host with additional 4 GB RAM and 1 NIC. Then I relocated resources for VM's to perform better with new hardware.

All fine until here.

The problems begun when I wanted to upgrade ESXi 3.5 u2 to u3 version.
I started VI Update and checked for updates. 3 updates were found:
- Host Firmware update
- Something else, I do not remember anymore
- and VMware Tools update
I started update process and after 2 hours!!! update failed with error:

write error There is no space left on the device

After I stuck with this error for few hours, I found a workaround by reseting the Memory Reservation for all Virtual Machines to 0 MB.
Then first two upgrades passed fine.

...but 3rd update, VMTools update, won't install, and error is the same.
Here it is what hostd.log say:

[2009-03-13 23:52:05.097 'BaseLibs' 147466 info] [NFC DEBUG] NfcFile_ContinueReceive: about to write 262144 bytes to file
[2009-03-13 23:52:05.102 'BaseLibs' 147466 info] [NFC DEBUG] NfcServerLoop: sockFd ready for READ 
[2009-03-13 23:52:05.102 'BaseLibs' 147466 info] [NFC DEBUG] NfcServerLoop: Received file data 
[2009-03-13 23:52:05.128 'BaseLibs' 147466 info] [NFC DEBUG] NfcFile_ContinueReceive: about to write 262144 bytes to file
[2009-03-13 23:52:05.236 'BaseLibs' 147466 info] [NFC DEBUG] NfcServerLoop: sockFd ready for READ 
[2009-03-13 23:52:05.236 'BaseLibs' 147466 info] [NFC DEBUG] NfcServerLoop: Received file data 
[2009-03-13 23:52:05.267 'BaseLibs' 147466 info] [NFC DEBUG] NfcFile_ContinueReceive: about to write 262144 bytes to file
[2009-03-13 23:52:05.267 'BaseLibs' 147466 info] FILEIO: Write failed 28.
[2009-03-13 23:52:05.267 'BaseLibs' 147466 info] [NFC DEBUG] NfcFileRawRead: write error There is no space left on the device.
[2009-03-13 23:52:05.267 'BaseLibs' 147466 warning] [NFC ERROR] NfcFile_ContinueReceive: write failed. expected 262144, got -1
[2009-03-13 23:52:05.267 'BaseLibs' 147466 info] [NFC DEBUG] NfcFile_Delete: Deleting file '/tmp/C1681003-1B67-45CA-881C-893DDD4CE45C/VMware-tools.tar.gz'
[2009-03-13 23:52:05.282 'BaseLibs' 147466 warning] [NFC ERROR] NfcServerLoop: failed to receive file data 
[2009-03-13 23:52:05.282 'Nfc' 147466 error] Nfc_AuthdServerLoop saw error: File error -- Failed to write to the target file: There is no space left on the device

My guess is that partition, which holds /tmp directory, is out of free space.

Now, questions are:
- Is upgrading VMTools essential for system to work properly?
Lemme just note that 1 VM (win2003) has VMTools installed, while another VM (win200 does NOT! (simply - VMtools did not want to install on win2008 instance)
- Can I as a newbie do something to correct this update failure WITHOUT compromising system stability? How to increase /tmp free space? Or can I safely delete all files in /tmp AND how to do this? (it's ESXi, not ESX)

Thanx for any advice