vCenter Error: failed to open /var/log/vmware/journalxx.log

This error can occur when the file system has run out of available space - to verify this please refer to the below:

Enable SSH: Host and Clusters >> Host >> Configuration >> Security Profile >> Services >> Properties >> Start SSH.

Login via putty and check the filesystem usage with df:

df -h

If all partitions look OK in terms of disk usage proceed by checking the ramdisk uage with:

vdf -h

I found that the "root" ramdisk had utilized 99% of it's free space and hence was causing errors when attempting to perform operations such as creating or migrating VM's to the ESXI host.

We can identify which files / folders are consuming all of the space with:

du -sh /*

Because my problem consisted with the root ramdisk I ran:

du -sh /var/log/*

And identified it was the hpHelper.log file:

/var/log/hpHelper.log

The log file was reporting the following error

Simply blanking the file e.g.

/dev/null > /var/log/hpHelper.log