VSS issues when doing backups using VMware VDR

Hi,

During some consultancy projects @ SMB customers where we needed to install and configure VMware VDR to do some backups, we had some issues with Windows Machines and VSS. The result of the these errors with VSS was that the VDR backup jobs all failed.

Here some possible solutions (gonna try to keep the list up to date.)

• VSS could not be started on a Windows 2003 server

We had to reregister all VSS DLL’s, restart the server and everything was working again. (check this)

VMware KB Articles about possible VDR / VSS issues.

Cannot create quieced snapshots if backup or system recovery applications are installed KB 1009558

Troubleshooting Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) quiesce related issues KB 1007696

A virtual machine can freeze under load when you take quiesced snapshots or use custom quiescing scripts KB 5962168

Because VDR is taking snapshots of your virtual machines this can also be a interesing KB

Understanding virtual machine snapshots in VMware ESX KB 1015180