I'm having a problem with this Acronis vmProtect product and Acronis support is sending me this way for answers. Some machines will backup one night and then maybe another few nights those machines won't back up while others will. Anyway the bottom line is, inconsistant backups with some machines rarely ever getting backed up while others are routinely backed up without a problem.
Basically it's having a problem creating snapshots I guess. Here's s small exceprt from Acronis error logs:
Error code: 138
Module: 83
LineInfo: a859dd78cc91de2a
Fields:
Message: VMware failed to create a quiesced snapshot of the selected virtual machine. To back up the machine, power off the machine before the process or uninstall the Volume Shadow Copy Services Support feature of VMware Tools from the VM.
--------------------
Error code: 138
Module: 83
LineInfo: c7610e0a857bedca
Fields:
Message: VMware error: 'Creating a quiesced snapshot failed because the create snapshot operation exceeded the time limit for holding off I/O in the frozen virtual machine.'.
--------------------
Error code: 167
Module: 0
LineInfo: c7610e0a857bedca
Fields:
Message: Awaiting task 'CreateSnapshot' has failed. Reason: fault.FilesystemQuiesceFault.summary.
--------------------'.
Acronis is suggesting doing just that... Uninstalling Volume Shadow Copy Services Support feature of VMware Tools from the VM. I guess this means ALL of my VMs because I want a consistant environment. However here are a few concerns.
Is the ONLY way to uninstall this component from vmtools is to uninstall the tools completely, reboot, then reinstall the tools and select a custom install without the component? Is there any way I could just disable a service, do a registry hack or reinstall the tools on top of itself so it isn't going to be such a time consumer?
Another conern, with this component gone, will I be missing anything? Will I lose out to any functionality or experience any kind of reduced performance?
I have a mixed environment of machines running Server 2003, 2008, 2008 R2, etc...
This is on 3 physical VMware ESX 4.1 hosts and I run vcenter and utilize HA / DRS / Vmotion / and Site Recovery Manager (to an offsite DR system and san).
I VSCS from one test machine and the Acronis (whom backed it up successfully on 2/6 but failed on 2/7) backed it up fine today on 2/8.