CoNetrix

Blog: snapshot

Recently, quiesce snapshot jobs for some customers kept showing up as failed in Veeam with the error "msg.snapshot.error-quiescingerror".

After exhausting several research options I called VMware Support and we began sifting through event log files on the server as well as looking at the VSS writers and how VMware Tools was installed.

Looking at the log files on the ESX host the server was on led to this article:

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2039900

A folder named backupScripts.d gets created and references a path C:\Scripts\PrepostSnap\ which is empty. Therefore the job fails. The fix is found below:

  1. Log in to the Windows virtual machine that is experiencing the issue.
  2. Navigate to C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools.
  3. Rename the backupscripts.d folder to backupscripts.d.old

If that folder is not present, and/or if the job still fails, the VMware services checked.

Networking, Veeam, VMware, ESX, snapshot,
 

I recently needed to move several VMDK files from a VMware datastore that had filled up due to an old snapshot. To move the first VMDK I used SSH to connect to the vSphere host, browsed to the datastore, and entered:

"cp –R /source/directory/ /dest/directory/"

to recursively copy the VMDK and snapshots to the new datastore. Because of the size of this VMDK this copy command took just over 24 hours to finish. Once it completed I unfortunately found that not only had the VMDK had been converted from thin provisioned to thick, but the snapshots had also ballooned to the size of the thick base disk.
 
It turns out that vSphere provides a much better way to copy VMDKs that will not only retain thin provisioning, but will also merge snapshots while copying. I used a command similar to the following to clone a VMDK:
 
vmkfstools -i "/vmfs/volumes/Datastore/examplevm/examplevm-000001.vmdk" "/vmfs/volumes/Datastore 2/newexamplevm/newexamplevm.vmdk" -d thin -a buslogic
 
The ‘-i’ flag tells vmkfstools that we want to clone the drive, the ‘-d’ flag specifies the disk type and the ‘-a’ flag specifies the storage adapter type (in this case SCSI with the BusLogic controller).
 
VMware has a KB on cloning VMDKs with vmkfstools, available here.

Networking, VMDK, VMware, ESX, snapshot,