Backing up powered off VMs

[averylarry]

I was trying to backup powered off VMs to be absolutely certain that I wouldn't have any snapshot VSS crash-consistent whatever issues. The snapshots never seemed to finish (VMware showed the snapshot creation process at 95% and it sat there for 15 minutes refusing to finish).

Is this not supported? I've grown to trust snapshots on running machines -- especially application-aware snapshots -- but in this case I just wanted to be very sure that there wouldn't be file or application corruption.

[Vitaliy S.]

It doesn't matter whether you're backing up powered on or powered off VMs, they are both treated the same. For me it sounds like you might have an environmental issue, please verify that you can manually create and remove a snapshot for this VM, and then retry your backup job again.

If nothing helps, please contact our support team for further investigation. Thanks!

[averylarry]

I tried several times to no avail. However, I just tested it and it worked fine (on a non-production VM). Perhaps it was just an issue with getting v6 all figured out. Or perhaps it was a network issue -- I had everything down for the backup except the backup server, the SQL server, and a physical machine that does DNS and stuff.

False alarm, I guess. Sorry.

[Vitaliy S.]

Thanks for the update! Of course it works fine, as our QC engineers do pretty good job, especially with testing common scenarios