Intelligent backup misses client if VMware tools are not running

[neptor]

Running 7.6.0.3 on Windows 2008 R2 Master. VCenter is 5.5.1
We happened to run across an issue that appears to be a gap in intelligent backups.
On a VMware client the tools that are normally running were not running.
The remaining backups ran with no issue as expected, but the client that
had the annotation, but tools were not started was skipped and was not
backed up and no error issued. I was wondering if anyone happen to run across this same
situation and is there any fix?

Thank you.
 

[Marianne]

vmtools is a requirement for VMware policy. There is no workaround.

[Nicolai]

More info needed

I stopped VMtools in  a VM and ran a backup using a query from the master servers. Backup ran without problems. Netbackup did not skip anything.

Please verify again if the VM was really skipped. If and if it was, could it potential have attributes set that caused it to miss a query from the master server ?

Best Regards

Nicolai

[neptor]

The reason it was noticed is that we moved to a new Vcenter server and we wanted to make sure everything was captured. Comparing the clients backed up to a listing of what should be backed up. It seems stange that it would back it up considering how did the snapshot take place?

[Nicolai · Accepted solution]

VMware tool is not responsible for creating the snapshot - that is something the ESX server does.

But VMware tools do receive a signal from VMware to quiescence disk I/O upon backup time. Without VMware tools the backup will be inconsistent.

Understanding virtual machine snapshots in VMware ESXi and ESX

Quiescing a file system is a process of bringing the on-disk data of a physical or virtual computer into a state suitable for backups. This process might include such operations as flushing dirty buffers from the operating system's in-memory cache to disk, or other higher-level application-specific tasks.

Note: Quiescing indicates pausing or altering the state of running processes on a computer, particularly those that might modify information stored on disk during a backup, to guarantee a consistent and usable backup. Quiescing is not necessary for memory snapshots; it is used primarily for backups.

And this also :

Overview of VMware Tools