VMWare Tools Timeout errors when Avamar experiences a quiesce issue?

Question

Hello, I've got a server that has been reporting Service Control Manager errors for the VMTools service timing out. After digging around investigating I've discovered these errors start at the same time that Avamar is doing a scheduled backup of the server. More to the point the VMTools service starts erroring out at the same moment the backup runs into a quiesce issue as seen in the error here. And here's the error I'm getting from the event log. These errors will continue even after the backup completes, until either 1. the server reboots or 2. I restart the VMTools service. They occur every 30 seconds - 1 minute. The quiescing error is at the exact same time as the VMTools service error starts off, so I know their related. However these errors don't happen every night despite the server backing up every night. My issue is I haven't been able to figure out what's causing the issue so I can stop it from happening. The issue only started about 2 weeks ago and as I said it's intermittent, the server doesn't have a quiescing problem with every backup so we don't see the VMTools error with every backup. Anyone else getting a similar issue?

ionthegeek · Answer

I would recommend you work with VMware on this issue. When Avamar performs a VM Image backup, it sends a snapshot request to VMware through the VDDK API. At that point, VMware invokes VMTools on the VM to perform any required quiescing tasks before creating the snapshot and making making it available for Avamar to use.

There may be an issue with VMTools on the VM.

Troy_S · Answer

Thanks, Ian. I'll contact them as well to see if they can give me any clues.

Avamar

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