Installing the Volume Shadow Copy Service with VMware Tools

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

This article provides steps to install the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) on a virtual machine on ESX 3.5 Update 2 or higher.

Resolution

ESX 3.5 Update 2 provides quiescing support using VSS. However, the VSS components are not installed when upgrading VMware Tools on a Windows Server 2003 virtual machine.

 

You can install VSS components manually by performing an interactive tools upgrade with VMware Infrastructure (VI) Client.

 

To manually install VSS:

1. In the VMware Tools installer, select Modify > Drivers > VSS.
2. Complete the installation process.
3. Restart the virtual machine to make sure VSS components are installed and running.

Note: For more information about VSS, seehttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc785914(WS.10).aspx.