Veeam VSS and VMware Tools Quiescing

[NightBird]

Hello,

Could I use Veeam VSS and VMware Tools Quiescing in the same Veeam job (Veeam VSS for most VM, but VMware Tools Quiescing for some) ?

Thx

Regards,
Boris EY

[Gostev]

Hello, yes you can. VMware Tools quiescence, if enabled in the advanced settings, will be automatically used for all VMs for which you do not have application-aware processing enabled. Thanks!

[NightBird]

Thx for your reply Gostev

Veeam is a awesome product.

With a 2 opteron 6 cores hardware the speed is great should I use optimal or best compression with this kind of hardware ? (2-3 jobs running in parallel)

2 replication jobs (every hour) and some backup jobs

[Gostev]

Wow, use Best of course... no reason not to put those 12 cores to work for sake of even smaller backups files storage is most expensive thing!

[darryl]

[merged]

I've searched and seen some threads on this, but I want to confirm the current behaviour.

Is this still true:
a) The only way to run scripts before and after a VM backup is to enable VMware tools quiescence.
b) If I enable application aware image processing on the backup job, VMware tools quiescence is not used, regardless of the setting.

The situation:
I have a backup job with around 20 VMs. I have one VM that I need to run before/after scripts on. I don't want to disable application aware processing for that entire job, just so I can run a before/after script on one VM. So this really means I need to create a separate backup job for that one VM, and disable the Veeam VSS support on it?

[Alexey D.]

Hello,

Yes, a) and b) are correct.
Pre-freeze and post-thaw scripts are triggered by means of VMware tools that's why you should have the quiescence enabled.

You don't necessarily have to split that VM into a single job, please refer to this post of Anton for explanation.

[darryl]

Alexey - thanks for the quick reply. I will disable Veeam VSS for that VM only.

It would be handy if Veeam had a way to do some form of pre/post scripts without requiring VMware quiescence being enabled (and Veeam VSS disabled). I could definitely see the need to run scripts against a VM that also has VSS aware apps on it.

[davegold]

If the application aware processing fails, will it use vmware tools as a "failover?"

(I'm thinking no--since application aware's failure options do not include "use vmware tools quiescence if application aware fails)

Thanks,

Dave

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Dave, we have this question covered in great details in the User Guide (page 30), please have a look there!