VMware Workstation – Cannot Assign Available PCI Slot

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An interesting little problem when I decided to add additional Network Adapters to a Virtual Machine in VMware Workstation.

The Virtual Machine had no problem starting with the original hardware as below.

Image: Original Hardware

But when I added two more virtual Network Adapters, on powering on the VM, received this error “Cannot assign available PCI slot to …. There are no more PCI slots available in the virtual machine. Please remove some devices ….”

Image: No more PCI slots error

The fix was to edit the VM_NAME.vmx file (check ‘Virtual Machine Settings > Options tab > Working directory’ for location) and add the lines –

pciBridge0.present = "TRUE"
pciBridge0.pciSlotNumber = "16"

Note: If you’re having problems, try typing out the above – sometimes the formatting's out if you copy and paste!

– before the line scsi0.pciSlotNumber = “16”, and then increment all the pre-existing pciSlotNumber entries by 1 (so they are consecutively numbered) like in the image below.

Image: VMX file pciSlotNumber entries

Note: ethernet4 and ethernet5 will auto generate on boot.

Comments

  1. Unknown14 February 2013 at 10:19

    today a run in exact the same problem thanks to your post I solved it, thankyou cheers Juergen

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous6 April 2013 at 22:01

    The VMX file seems to have less information in
    VMworkstation 9.0.2 build-1031769

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous29 May 2013 at 12:13

    Thanks. This has really helped me ... :-)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Unknown16 September 2013 at 18:30

    Excellent! my problem was not exactly mine and had to delete a whole unused device but this was the key. thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Unknown2 December 2013 at 02:32

    This worked for me... Thanks a lot!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous20 February 2014 at 00:52

    Just had the exact same issue for exactly the same reason with the exact same VM :-)
    Thanks for post, saved me time. Cheers!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Dave1 April 2014 at 23:10

    This works on ESXi 5.1 as well.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Hien Nguyen1 August 2014 at 10:07

    Thank you for your post! It fixes my issue with CDOT 8.2.1 Simulator that adds 2 additional NAT NICs for a total of 6 NICs.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Carsonok3 August 2014 at 14:03

      Thanks Hien. That's exactly why I needed it to ;-)

      Delete
  9. ICEMAN_CHAMBERS7 April 2017 at 19:39

    Hi,
    I´m using workstation 12 and CDOT 8.2.3 and experimented the same issue, with a notepad just add at the middle of the .vmx file the following lines:

    pciBridge0.present = "TRUE"
    pciBridge4.present = "TRUE"
    pciBridge4.virtualDev = "pcieRootPort"
    pciBridge4.functions = "8"
    pciBridge5.present = "TRUE"
    pciBridge5.virtualDev = "pcieRootPort"
    pciBridge5.functions = "8"
    pciBridge6.present = "TRUE"
    pciBridge6.virtualDev = "pcieRootPort"
    pciBridge6.functions = "8"
    pciBridge7.present = "TRUE"
    pciBridge7.virtualDev = "pcieRootPort"
    pciBridge7.functions = "8"

    Until now it appears to be working well.

    I found the solution in this link:

    https://community.netapp.com/t5/Simulator-Discussions/issues-about-Simulator-Clustered-ONTAP-8-2-1RC1-on-ESXi-5-1/td-p/23174

    ReplyDelete
  10. Unknown12 December 2018 at 15:43

    Thank you this worked!

    ReplyDelete
  11. Mona martin16 March 2019 at 05:12

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete

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