If you disabled vmware quiescence for your Linux VMs: why?

[Daniel2]

There is a trend starting at my company to disable quiescence for Linux VMs for dubious reasons, instead of fixing the underlying issues. Or maybe I'm just being ignorant and I also prefer to have a streamlined backup configuration. Having to have an additional non-quiescence job for every backup job would become tedious to manage.

Now I'm just curious for legitimate reasons why you disable vmware quiescence on Linux VMs. (Disregard Windows as we use app-aware proc.)

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Daniel.

- If you [JUST] enable vmware tools quescense for a linux VM - nothing happens. That is only to tell vmware you have special pre-freeze and post-thaw scripts for critical applications on every single protected linux machine that must be executed before\after VM snapshot process is triggered. So maybe, in your case, your company had 200 linux machines with enabled quiescence and no scripts in place? In that case, disabling vmware tools quescense can be justified as unnecessary(they arent triggered anyway, than why care)? It is just a wild guess, but that is first thing that comes into mind before digging into political\structural reasons.
- Maybe company has switched to native application-level backups(say inside VM, SQL database does local dumps every so often) in that case having quiescence at VM level is unnecessary as well - you have a local SQL backup file, which is 100% consistent(due to not being transactional). So you can perform crash-consistent VM backup and have perfect SQL backup file inside - in case of a failure, you restore that file and perform application-native data restore from it.

/Cheers!

[Andreas Neufert]

As Egor said by default there is nothing enabled on the VMware Tools Quiescense processing within VMs. But you need to deal then with a lot of side effects that prevent VMware from creating backups. As we just tell VMware to create those snapshots, the logs go directly into VMware logs and not the Veeam logs. The root cause analyse after issues is cumbersum.

We never recommend to enable VMware Tools quiescense and always ask our customer to enable Veeam Guest Processing as needed.

You can find a good overview about this topic here: https://www.veeambp.com/job_configurati ... processing