VMware & W2K8R2 & Exchange & DataRecovery = Cannot quiesce virtual machine

Today I encountered yet again the intermitent and annoying problem of vms not being correctly backed up in one of our DataRecovery appliances for one of our customer. After analyzing, I wasn't surprised to find that one of the VMs, Windows 2008 R2 with Exchange server 2010 installed, could not be taken a snapshot, therefore failing to backup the vm whatsoever.

I wouldn't normally worry too much when this occurrs, as normally we use DataRecovery only as a "just in case" tool, but all our customers have a mandatory system and file remote backup in place. BUT, with this particular customer, some super-duper-intelligent salesman decided to sell them DataRecovery as a backup solution, which, not only is it crazy and unreliable, but also makes it complicated to manage, as we cannot count on all backups running smoothly every time...

Anyway (enough about complaints), back to the point. If you MUST no matter how have a DR backup for a machine and it's giving you problems, the only way to solve the issue without having to should down the server (because as our friend Murphy know, backup only fails on production servers, never on development) is what our vmware friends tell us on KB 1031200 and 1031298, disabling VSS writers usage on VMware tools.

For my particular case, this is how it went:

1. You detect a really nice message saying your backup is f*?¿ up:

 7/5/2013 9:31:05 AM: Normal backup using 3 Wednesday Bck  
 7/5/2013 9:32:20 AM: Failed to create snapshot for CUSTOMER-EX02, error -3960 ( cannot quiesce virtual machine)  

2. You check it is in fact a VSS problem by listing the vss writers from the server's CMD (for space's sake, I'm only copying the failed vss writers):

 C:\Users\admin>vssadmin list writers  
 vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool  
 (C) Copyright 2001-2005 Microsoft Corp.  
 Writer name: 'Microsoft Exchange Replica Writer'  
   Writer Id: {76fe1ac4-15f7-4bcd-987e-8e1acb462fb7}  
   Writer Instance Id: {6c4d533f-8eb8-4489-b053-2865907151cd}  
   State: [1] Stable  
   Last error: Retryable error  

Writer name: 'Microsoft Exchange Writer'
   Writer Id: {76fe1ac4-15f7-4bcd-987e-8e1acb462fb7}
   Writer Instance Id: {43789d60-ebea-43a3-8b27-5b488c41ef58}
   State: [1] Stable
   Last error: Retryable error 

3. You make sure no other errors are messing with you throu the event viewer / Applications:

4. Once this is done, you only have to proceed with the information extracted from vware KBs (links at the end of the post as a reference):

• Go to %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Application Data\VMware\VMware Tools\
• Modify (or create if it doesn't exist) the vmbackup.conf file
• Place the name of the VSS you want to disable, one per line, in my case:

 Microsoft Exchange Replica Writer  
 Microsoft Exchange Writer  

• Restar vmware tools service in the services console

This solved it for me int his scenario. Obviously, not an ideal solution, but in this case it was necessary to at least have a copy. You can rever this changes whenever you need to.

The required URLS from vmware are:

KB 1031200 (Solution applied in this post)

KB 1031298 (This explains another solution, but requires turning off the machine and therefore haven't tried it out. The "soft" solution at the end of the KB did not work for me)

Cheers!

Nissy