One of our VMs, a Windows 2008 Std server, suddenly cannot take quiesced snapshots anymore, all other VMs are fine.
During backup operation (Nakivo) we noticed that the VM could not be quiesced and I started investigating and found that a manual snapshot (Not ticked: Snapshot the virtual machine's memory and ticked: Quiesce guest file system), would reproduce the problem. When I try a snapshot including memory it succeeds!?
The manual snapshot progress counter goes to 95% before it shows the error result:
An error occurred while saving the snapshot: msg.snapshot.error-QUIESCINGERROR.
In ESXi event log we see the following error:
Warning message on Server1: The guest OS has reported an error during quiescing. The error code was: 5 The error message was:
'VssSyncStart' operation failed: The data area passed to a system call is too small. (0x8007007a)
The event log in the Windows server does not show any errors or warnings. I can see the following events in the System log:
Information 19/12/2014 14:21:31 Service Control Manager Eventlog Provider 7036 None
Information 19/12/2014 14:21:31 Virtual Disk Service 4 None
Information 19/12/2014 14:21:30 Service Control Manager Eventlog Provider 7036 None
Information 19/12/2014 14:21:30 Virtual Disk Service 3 None
Information 19/12/2014 14:21:29 Service Control Manager Eventlog Provider 7036 None
Information 19/12/2014 14:21:29 Virtual Disk Service 4 None
Information 19/12/2014 14:21:27 Service Control Manager Eventlog Provider 7036 None
Information 19/12/2014 14:21:27 Virtual Disk Service 3 None
Information 19/12/2014 14:21:26 Service Control Manager Eventlog Provider 7036 None
Information 19/12/2014 14:20:22 Service Control Manager Eventlog Provider 7036 None
Information 19/12/2014 14:20:22 Service Control Manager Eventlog Provider 7036 None
Basically the Virtual Disk service starts and stops without errors.
Our ESXi cluster runs version 5.5.0, 2143827 and all VMs have the latest tools installed.
On the troubled VM I even removed the tools and reinstalled them, which did not make a difference.
Any ideas?
Thanks, Edwin