VMware Tools does not support quiesced snapshots on FreeBSD

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

A request for a quiesced snapshot of a FreeBSD guest made through the CreateSnapshotEx_Task interface will fail with the error message "An error occurred while saving the snapshot: Failed to quiesce the virtual machine."

A request for a quiesced snapshot of a FreeBSD guest made through the CreateSnapshot_Task interface may be reported as successful, but no actual quiescing will be done in the guest; instead, the VMware Tools service will make best efforts to flush file system buffers.  Any resulting snapshot will not be quiesced and will be shown as not quiesced in the vSphere client.

A request for a quiesced snapshot of a FreeBSD guest made through the vSphere client will behave similarly as one requested through CreateSnapshot_Task.

In general, quiesced snapshots are only supported on Windows and Linux guests.  There are at present no plans to support quiesced snapshots on FreeBSD guests.