[Horizon] Cannot power on VMs after deleting resource pools

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.