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NBU & VMware Quiesced Snapshot

rizwan84tx
Level 6
Certified

Hi All,

Enabling the Virtual Machine Quiesce in the NBU policy for VMware backup is what symantec recommends for VMware backups. In our environment we have 800+ VMs, out of which 10% of VMs that are windows clients fail in taking Quiesce snapshots.

To overcome this failure (without downtime), we plan to disable the  Virtual Machine Quiesce for those VMs. Before deploying this, have tested the restore and the VM was restored sucessfully.

VMware tools reinstallation and doing configuration changes in VM settings needs downtime, which i cannot afford.

Has anyone doing thier VMware backups with Quiesce disabled, encountering issues on restore? I would like to receive your comments on this.

 

NBU 7.1.0.2 on Windows 2008 R2 EE

 

Regards,

Rizwan.

3 REPLIES 3

Mark_Solutions
Level 6
Partner Accredited Certified

One of the most frequent causes of this is Windows Servers with Exchange or SQL installed that cause the snapshot to fail due to trying to snapshot the application.

You can disable this in the tools.conf file and this only needs a VMTools servcice re-start to register:

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH141518

May be worth looking at you failures to see if this could be the case

Either way I agree with Nicolai - it is better to have a valid backup and no doubt if the worst happened and you could not restore a server we all know whos' fault it would be!

Nicolai
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP   

From T/N : http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO44471

Without quiescing file activity, data consistency in the snapshot cannot be guaranteed. If not consistent, the backed up data may be of little or no value.

If this option is disabled, the snapshot is created without quiescing I/O
on the virtual machine. In this case, you must perform your own checks for data consistency in the backup data.

Caution: Symantec does not recommend that you disable quiesce. In most case, this option should be enabled. 

Just some thought:

The question is - can you afford to loose data with a wortless backup ?. That in-consistent could very well be shadow copy components or other vital part preventing the OS from booting.

As a workaround you could deploy agents for those VM's until the main issues can be resolved.

rizwan84tx
Level 6
Certified

Thank you Mark & Nicolai. I will go by link that Mark has mentioned and check the backup status.