SMVI Snapshot timeouts

[txskibum2000]

I know this is probably a vmware or windows issue, but I wish someone had a good solution to the "Cannot create a quiesced snapshot because the snapshot operation exceeded the time limit for holding off I/O in the frozen virtual machine" issue, without disabling vss and doing a non-quiesced snapshot.

I have read vmware KB 1018194 and the following Community discussion...no good solution.

http://tinyurl.com/3hg4mat

http://tinyurl.com/42zmr7l

[keitha]

I moved your question to it's own thread as its easier for peopel to find it at a later date. That "Got Questions" thread is waaay to far off topic.

Yes this is a common problem. Either the VM is too busy or is not responding to the VSS writer in the VMware tools attempt to quiece. A few options. You can just not use the VMware snapshots at all. This option makes SMVI very very fast and reliable and only sacrifices a little bit of consistency. It does however allow me to up the frequency of the backups to accommodate for that. Option B is you could remove the VSS writer in the VMware tools. again this only reduces the consistency of that one VM but likely will make the VMware snaps work better as it may just be that one VM with the slow response or Option C is to only do VMware snapshot on selective VMs which reduces the load on the VMFS file system which also sometimes causes this error.

I hope this helps.

Keith