Error Backing up 1 of 50 VM's

[cwilson]

On one of my hosts i recently started receiving the following error when backing it up:

Releasing VM files CreateSnapshot failed, vmRef vm-3689, timeout 1800000, snName "VEEAM BACKUP TEMPORARY SNAPSHOT", snDescripti
on "Please do not delete this snapshot. It is being used by Veeam Backup.", memory False, quiesce True Creating a quiesced snapshot failed because the (user-supplied) custom pre-freeze script in the virtual machine exited with a non-zero return code.

All other VM's on the same host backup without problem. Any ideas?

[Ben Milligan]

Corey, this issue has also been raised here:
http://forum.veeam.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=872

What kind of OS is this VM? There is a VMware Tools issue where this error can arise when a Linux server has one or more snapshots existing. Also you might want to make sure that you are on the latest version of VMware tools for this guest.

[cwilson]

Thanks Ben. The VM is windows 2008 in core mode as a domain controller. Nothing to my knowledge has changed on the server and its been working fine for the past couple months. Out of the blue this has started.

[Ben Milligan]

Ok - so this is a W2k8 DC, so you really would be advised to use VSS for this particular job. Is this the way you are currently running it? I suggest setting up VSS for this machine in the VSS portion of the properties, please advise if you receive another error after doing this.

Thanks!

[cwilson]

I thought I did, confirmed and I did NOT have vss enabled for this host(and all windows vm's). If I remember correctly I had disabled it because it was causing backup failures. Not had a problem upto this point not using the vss but i have re-enabled it and we'll see what comes of the backups this weekend. I will update the thread early next week.

Thanks Ben

[Gostev]

Corey, unless you only have one DC, you should really make sure to backup your DCs with VSS enabled. You will not be able to restore DC correctly if backup was created without VSS. Refer to this blog post for more information.

[cwilson]

we back these up using other means as well as bulk image based backups as vm image. Will post the results come next week.