If you installed VMware ESXi on a USB stick like I did, the “scratch space” (used for storing logs and debug information) is stored on a RAM disk. This takes up 512MB of memory that could otherwise be provisioned to virtual machines. In addition, it does not persist across reboots, which explains why I was never able to find any logs after a crash. Also I was seeing random “No space left on device” errors when I was trying to run the munin monitoring script for ESXi. The solution to this is to simply create a folder on a disk, and Continue Reading