Failed to quiesce snapshot of the Windows 2008 R2 virtual machine (1031298)

Failed to quiesce snapshot of the Windows 2008 R2 virtual machine (1031298) | VMware KB

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Details

Unable to create a quiesced snapshot of the Windows 2008 R2 virtual machine.
Cloning a Windows 2008 R2 virtual machine fails. Note: For additional symptoms and log entries, see the Additional Information section.

Solution

This issue occurs due to VSS application snapshots that are created without using the VMware software.

This is a known issue affecting ESX/ESXi 4.1 and later.

Currently there is no resolution.

To work around this issue, disable the VSS quiesced application based snapshots in the virtual machine. For more information, see Disabling VSS quiesced application based snapshots in virtual machine (2146204).

Additional Information

You experience these additional symptoms:

In the Application section of the Event Viewer in a virtual machine, Windows guest operating system reports an VSS error similar to: Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Unexpected error calling routine IOCTL_DISK_SET_SNAPSHOT_INFO(\\.\PHYSICALDRIVE1 ) fails with winerror 1168. hr = 0x80070490, Element not found.
Any process that creates a quiesced snapshot fails with the error. cannot create a quiesced snapshot because the create snapshot operation exceeded the time limit for holding off I/O in the frozen virtual machine.
Backup applications, such as VMware Data Recovery, fails with the error. Failed to create snapshot for vmname, error -3960 (cannot quiesce virtual machine)