Failure to quiesce VMware backup after the installation of Symantec VSS

[Oqlus]

I'm attempting to enable the SharePoint and SQL granular functionality within our VMware backups, so on one system that was otherwise working as expected with NetBackup under the default VMTools configuration, I installed the Symantec VSS provider. As expected, the installation process uninstalled the VMware Snapshot Provider (and I have verified that it is no longer installed within \Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools\Drivers, and its Windows registry entry is gone), and following a reboot of the VM, the Symantec VSS was reportedly successfully installed. However, backup attempts are now failing to quiesce, which was functional before I underwent this process. 

The error stack on the VMware side:

"Cannot quiesce this virtual machine because VMware Tools is not currently available."

VMware Tools was not uninstalled, and within Windows, its service is presently reporting as actively running. vCenter also reports, "VMware Tools: Running, version:10272 (Current)"

Client- Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard, VM version 10, vCenter 6.0, NetBackup 7.7.2

Policy- Optimizations: all checked, Primary VM identfier: VM display name, Transport mode: nbd, Virtual machine quiesce: enabled

[Thiago_Ribeiro]

Hi Oqlus,

I was looking for something about this problem and I found this VMware article:

https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=10181...

Mayble it can help you? This article is about Symantec VSS with VMware tools.

Please share with us the errors from NBU side

Thiago

[Oqlus]

I'd seen that article, but its issue centers around heavy I/O on the guest VM, and this one is currently using only 1% of its 6 vCPUs, and 11% of its 36GB of RAM. NetBackup doesn't even have a chance to do much of anything, because even a manually-run quiesced snapshot initiated directly from vCenter errors out (with the message listed above, "Cannot quiesce this virtual machine because VMware Tools is not currently available") within 36 ms of starting. This isn't a timeout issue. 

...and all of this was working before the VMware VSS provider was uninstalled. 

Just for good measure, today we started the entire process over from the beginning by uninstalling everything (VMTools and Symantec VSS), reinstalling VMware Tools without VSS, rebooting, and then installing Symantec VSS, which went smoothly, because it recognized that the VMware VSS provider was not installed. However, that has changed nothing, we're still having the same problem, and we won't be able to get another reboot outage (which shouldn't be necessary, but then, nothing else has worked either) for another week.

[Oqlus]

I've figured out the correlation.

• VMware Tools version:9354, quiesce works fine
• VMware Tools version:10272 (Current), quiesce broken

Did I miss something within a published NetBackup compatibility matrix? 

[Thiago_Ribeiro]

Hi,

I don't think so, the snapshot works with VMware tools version 9354 e doens not works with version 10272...Other think you cannot create snapshot from vmware console, for me it can be a vmware problem, probably with vmware tools version. have you opportunity to check these articles

https://pubs.vmware.com/Release_Notes/en/vmwaretools/1009/vmware-tools-1009-release-notes.html#resol...

http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2016/07/30/vmware-tools-causes-virtual-machine-snapshot-with-qui...