Upgrade Error "Insufficient space on the source export partition

Upgrade Error “Insufficient space on the source export partition ‘/’.

Post category:VMware / Vmware vSphere
Post published:December 2, 2019
Post last modified:January 6, 2020

Introduction

While Doing the Update of vCenter, you might get into an issue as mentioned in the screenshot below: “Insufficient space on the source export partition ‘/’ to accommodate all the data for upgrade data option ‘core’. Required: 5.93 GB, current: 4.8 GB Resolution“

While looking at the select Upgrade data you will see something like this:

"Insufficient space on the source export partition '/' to accommodate all the data for upgrade data option 'core'.

Size of the Data is 17.9 GB, However, the Size of the “/” Partition is only 4.7 GB. In this case, you won’t be able to move further with the Upgrade and will get the Error: “Insufficient space on the source export partition ‘/’ to accommodate all the data for upgrade data option ‘core’. Required: 5.93 GB, current: 4.8 GB Resolution”

After taking SSH to the vCenter when you will run df -h you will see the below output:

Filesystem	Size	Used	Avail	Use%	Mounted on
devtmpfs	4.9G	0	4.9G	0%	/dev
tmpfs	4.9G	20K	4.9G	1%	/dev/shm
tmpfs	4.9G	660K	4.9G	1%	/run
tmpfs	4.9G	0	4.9G	0%	/sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda3	11G	5.3G	4.7G	53%	/
tmpfs	4.9G	232M	4.7G	5%	/tmp
/dev/sda1	120M	35M	80M	30%	/boot
/dev/mapper/seat_vg-seat	9.8G	337M	8.9G	4%	/storage/seat
/dev/mapper/imagebuilder_vg	9.8G	23M	9.2G	1%	/storage/imagebuilder
/dev/mapper/db_vg-db	9.8G	157M	9.1G	2%	/storage/db
/dev/mapper/autodeploy_vg	9.8G	32M	9.2G	1%	/storage/autodeploy
/dev/mapper/core_vg-core	25G	106M	24G	1%	/storage/core
/dev/mapper/updatemgr_vg	99G	415M	93G	1%	/storage/updatemgr
/dev/mapper/log_vg-log	9.8G	1.5G	7.8G	16%	/storage/log
/dev/mapper/dblog_vg-dblog	15G	150M	14G	2%	/storage/dblog
/dev/mapper/netdump_vg	985M	1.3M	932M	1%	/storage/netdump

Resolution:

Now, in this case, you have 3 Options:

Extent the Size of the vCenter Partition, which is going to take some time.
Delete the Existing Data from the/Partition disk, which is also difficult when we are talking about moving 17.9GB of Data.
The Best option, in this case, is you can simply provide a new Partition where vCenter can dump its data while migrating contents from One vCenter to another.

In the Export Directory you can either type: Storage/Core as it has 24 GB of Free Space and we only need 17.9 GB.

Now you should be able to Upgrade the vCenter to your desired version.

Refer to the link for more interesting VMware issues: https://knowitlikepro.com/category/vmware/

Tip: Always follow the Upgrade Sequence as mentioned in the article: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/53710

Ashutosh Dixit

I am currently working as a Senior Technical Support Engineer with VMware Premier Services for Telco. Before this, I worked as a Technical Lead with Microsoft Enterprise Platform Support for Production and Premier Support. I am an expert in High-Availability, Deployments, and VMware Core technology along with Tanzu and Horizon.