Creating a quiesced snapshot during backup generates NTFS Warnings/Errors

When your backup software (eg. IBM Tivoli Data Protection for VMware) creates a quiesced snapshot on a Windows Server, sometimes one or more of the following NTFS Warnings/Errors can be found in the machines eventlogs:

• ID 50 NTFS Warning, delayed write failed / delayed write lost
• ID 57 NTFS Warning, failed to flush data to the transaction log. Courruption may occur.
• ID 137, NTFS Error, The default transaction resource manager on volume [] encountered a non-retryable error
• ID 140, NTFS Warning, failed to flush data to the transaction log. Courruption may occur in VolumeID:
• ID 12289 VSS Error, Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Unexpected error DeviceIOControl

The reason for the generated events is, that duplicate disks are created in the virtual machine.

There is a KB Article from VMware stating that this is a known Microsoft issue: Creating a quiesced snapshot of a Window 2008 R2 virtual machine generates Event IDs 50, 57, 137, 140, or 12289 (2006849).

If you do not want to ignore the errors/warnings in your eventlog you can use the following workaround:

• open C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Tools\Tools.conf in a text editor (eg. notepad)
• if the file does not exist, create it
• add these lines to the file:

[vmbackup]

vss.disableAppQuiescing = true

• save the file
• exit the editor
• restart the VMware Tools Service for the changes to take effect