Disabling quiescence on a single VM in a job?

[whman]

Hi All,
I'm looking at modifying an existing job running against linux machines running in ESXi. I have quiescence enabled, however I'd like to disable it for one of the VMs in the backup job as the quiescence/snapshot times out. So far it seems like I'll have to make another backup job for this one VM (as quiescence is a job wide setting), but I'd like to keep it in the same job if I can to take better advantage of de-duplication.

I figure enabling application aware processing for this one vm would disable quiescence for just the one, but I'm not too sure. I'm also not sure what happens if any of the VSS tricks are enabled on a linux backup job either, I know it can continue after failure but I'm not sure of the impact of the attempt.

Anyone ever attempt such a configuration?

[foggy]

If you're talking about VMware Tools quiescence, then you cannot disable it just for this particular VM. Anyway, I'd rather investigate the reasons of why it occurs than try to disable quiescence at all.

[whman]

Ahh shoot.
I've looked into why quiescence is failing, but without any luck. For now I'm willing to settle for crash consistency.

[billcouper]

+1 to this

Please provide an option to selectively exclude VM's from 'VMware Tools Quiescence' or at least provide a "Fall back to crash-consistent tickbox after n failures" option.
We had a large volume of these and were able to resolve most, but when it's a hosted customer VM and you're asking the customer to fix their VSS issue... well... you can guess how that goes....

I've had to create a powershell script that runs on a schedule, looks for jobs that failed due to vmware quiescence fail, disables it and retries the job, then re-enables it when completed.... but then the veeam console reports "Failed" in the last status column, even though you click on the 'Failed' backup and it all says successful... (I have a ticket open for that, don't need a fix for that here, just mentioning because it's a ball-ache)

[PTide]

I've looked into why quiescence is failing, but without any luck. For now I'm willing to settle for crash consistency.

Do you have any particular error that is shown when quiescence fails? Did you contact a support team?

I figure enabling application aware processing for this one vm would disable quiescence for just the one, but I'm not too sure.

According to the user guide, yes, it should work the way you've described, just give it a try.

I'm also not sure what happens if any of the VSS tricks are enabled on a linux backup job either, I know it can continue after failure but I'm not sure of the impact of the attempt.

There will be no impact at all, since Linux does not have VSS components.

Thanks

[billcouper]

I can confirm that enabling app-aware backup for a VM will mean it no longer uses VMware Tools quiescence.
You can have VMware Tools quiescence enabled on the job and it will be used for all VM's that are NOT doing app-aware backups.