Unable to clone a running virtual machine due to quiescing failure.

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Upon reviewing the vmware.log, it was observed that there was an error when enabling the sync provider.

2025-06-19T09:02:02.144Z In(05) vmx - VigorTransportProcessClientPayload: opID=<opID> seq=615535: Receiving Snapshot.Take request. 2025-06-19T09:02:04.335Z In(05) vmx - [msg.snapshot.quiesce.vmerr] The guest OS has reported an error during quiescing. 2025-06-19T09:02:04.335Z In(05)+ vmx - The error code was: 3 2025-06-19T09:02:04.335Z In(05)+ vmx - The error message was: Error when enabling the sync provider. 2025-06-19T09:02:06.363Z In(05) vmx - SnapshotVMXTakeSnapshotComplete: Snapshot 0 failed: Failed to quiesce the virtual machine (29).

 

It was seen in the guest OS that processes for antivirus developed by Ahnlab were generating I/O activity on the root (/) filesystem.

#  lsof +D / COMMAND      PID       USER   FD   TYPE             DEVICE  SIZE/OFF      NODE NAME … v3procmgr   2561       root  cwd    DIR              253,0      4096       128 / …

 

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi

VMware vCenter Server

Cause

The issue occurs because the processes for antivirus are blocking the freeze operation triggered by the sync provider.

Resolution

As a workaround:

Customer can either disable anti-virus services or uninstall it in the guest OS.