Unable to take a quiesced VMware snapshot of a virtual machine
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Unable to take a quiesced VMware snapshot of a virtual machine

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Article ID: 330612

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Updated On:

Products

VMware Live Recovery VMware vCenter Server VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

  • During quiesced backup operations (VMware snapshots) on a virtual machine with Microsoft iSCSI LUNs attached within the guest operating system, virtual machines may become unresponsive.
  • VMware snapshot operations may fail.
  • You may see the error:

    Creating a quiesced snapshot failed because the created snapshot operation exceeded the time limit for holding     off I/O in the frozen virtual machine.
  • Using the snapshot manager through VMware Infrastructure (VI) Client to take a VMware snapshot of the virtual machine works without error.


Environment

VMware ESX 4.0.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1
VMware vCenter Server 5.0.x
VMware Consolidated Backup 1.5.x
VMware vCenter Server 5.5.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5
VMware ESX 4.1.x
VMware ESX Server 3.0.x
VMware Data Recovery 1.x
VMware ESXi 3.5.x Installable
VMware ESXi 4.0.x Installable
VMware Infrastructure SDK 2.0.x
VMware VirtualCenter 2.5.x
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Installable
VMware vCenter Server 4.0.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0
VMware ESXi 4.0.x Embedded
VMware vSphere Data Protection 5.1.x
VMware vCenter Server 4.1.x
VMware ESX Server 3.5.x
VMware VirtualCenter 2.0.x
VMware Data Recovery 2.x
VMware Consolidated Backup 1.1.x
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Embedded
VMware vSphere Data Protection 5.5.x
VMware vCenter Server 5.1.x
VMware Consolidated Backup 1.0.x
VMware ESXi 3.5.x Embedded

Resolution

When using the VSS or SYNC driver within a virtual machine, the tools attempt to quiesce all I/O, such as storage and memory, within the virtual machine.
If you are using Volume Shadow Copy service to perform the quiescing operation, see Troubleshooting Volume Shadow Copy quiesce related issues (1007696).
If you are using Microsoft's iSCSI initiator within the virtual machine, you cannot perform snapshot operations on the virtual machine because it is not supported. For more information, see Running a Third-Party iSCSI initiator in the Virtual Machine in the SAN System Design and Deployment Guide for your version of ESX.
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