Unable to take a quiesced VMware snapshot of a virtual machine

Products

• VMware Live Recovery
• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• During quiesced backup operations (VMware snapshots) on a virtual machine with Microsoft iSCSI LUNs attached within the guest operating system, virtual machines may become unresponsive.
• VMware snapshot operations may fail.
• You may see the error:
  
  Creating a quiesced snapshot failed because the created snapshot operation exceeded the time limit for holding off I/O in the frozen virtual machine.
  
  
• Using the snapshot manager through VMware Infrastructure (VI) Client to take a VMware snapshot of the virtual machine works without error.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0.x/7.0.x/8.0.x
VMware vCenter Server 6.5/6.7 / 7.0.x/8.0.x

Resolution

When using the VSS or SYNC driver within a virtual machine, the tools attempt to quiesce all I/O, such as storage and memory, within the virtual machine.

 

If you are using Volume Shadow Copy service to perform the quiescing operation, see Troubleshooting Volume Shadow Copy quiesce related issues (1007696).

 

If you are using the SYNC driver to perform the quiescing operation, see A virtual machine can freeze under load when you take quiesced snapshots or use custom quiescing scripts (5962168).

 

If you are using Microsoft's iSCSI initiator within the virtual machine, you cannot perform snapshot operations on the virtual machine because it is not supported.