An error occurred while saving the snapshot a required file was not found

Try reinstalling or updating your VMware tools to fix the issue

Symptoms

1. You are using one of the Acronis Cyber Backup products on an ESX Host to back up virtual machines;
2. The backup of one or several of the virtual machines fails with an error message similar to one of the following:

An error occurred while saving the snapshot: Failed to quiesce the virtual machine. An error occurred while taking a snapshot: Failed to quiesce the virtual machine.

Creating a quiesced snapshot failed

An error occurred while quiescing the virtual machine. See the virtual machine’s event log for details.

VMware failed to create a quiesced snapshot of the selected virtual machine. To back up the machine, power off the machine before the process or uninstall the Volume Shadow Copy Services Support feature of VMware Tools from the VM.

Protocol error from VMX

An error occurred while saving the snapshot: A required file was not found.

Cause

Please see the solution section of this article for specific causes and resolution.

Solution

1.1 VM snapshot should work correctly

Acronis software uses snapshots executed by the hypervisor while taking the virtual machine backup. It is necessary that these snapshots work correctly. Create a virtual machine snapshot to check the consistency :

1. Open the vSphere connection to the ESX host.
2. Right click on the machine > take snapshot > check the «Quiesce guest file system» 
3. Uncheck the «Snapshot the virtual machine’s memory» and click OK.

If taking quiesced snapshot fails, investigate the issue with the virtual machine (contact VMware support if needed)

In most cases, reinstalling/updating VMware tools and rebooting the virtual machine will resolve the issue with quiesced snapshot. Please see the following articles:

• VMware Knowledge Base Article 1009073
• VMware Knowledge Base Article 5962168
• VMware Knowledge Base Article 1007696
• VMware Knowledge Base Article 1007346
• VMware Knowledge Base Article 80246

If quiesced snapshot is created successfully but backup with Acronis still fails with the same error message, contact Acronis Support with a reference to this article

1.2 Verify VSS status

If you backup a virtual machine with transactional applications installed (SQL, Exchange evt.), then:

• VMware Tools should be installed inside that guest OS.
• VSS service should not be disabled inside the guest OS.

In case the guest OS event logs contain errors or warnings for VSS operations during creation of the snapshot, troubleshoot the VSS issues inside the guest OS.

If a virtual machine snapshot fails due to incorrect guest file system quiescing (snapshot without option Quiesce quest file system is successful), for virtual machines with no transcational applications installed you can workaround the issue by uninstalling the VMware Tools for the guest OS (see More information below) or by disabling Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) for Virtual Machines backup option (for Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud or Acronis Cyber Backup 12 and above).

Keep in mind the VMware ESX(i) virtualization platform limitations:

• Agent for VMware backs up a fault tolerant machine only if fault tolerance was enabled in VMware vSphere 6.0 and later,
• VMware vSphere does not support snapshots of independent disks and Raw Device Mapping (RDM) disks in physical compatibility mode. To overcome these limitations install an agent into the guest OS.

1.3 If the error message is:

Creating a quiesced snapshot failed because the create snapshot operation exceeded the time limit for holding off I/O in the frozen virtual machine

Then see the following article for a solution: VMware Knowledge Base Article 1038963 

If ESX(i) version is 6.0, install this patch.

 The error may be caused by pre-backup command failure. A pre-backup command (pre-freeze script located in /usr/sbin/pre-freeze-script on a Linux machine or in a specific directory on a Windows machine) is a user-supplied script that should be executed before backup. Usually, these scripts are used to quiesce an application that does not have its own VSS provider (in Windows) to ensure a consistent state before backup. When such a script exits with a non-zero return code, this indicates that the script failed to perform its quiescing task and quiesced snapshot operation has to be cancelled.

 See also the following solutions:

• If VM freezes during snapshot creation, see A virtual machine can freeze under load when you take quiesced snapshots or use custom quiescing scripts;
• If VM runs a database, try giving it more processors/RAM. Allow VM to use more of the host/cluster resources.

More information

Acronis Cyber Backup 12.5: If the backed up VM does not run a database, you can disable quiescing of VMs via VSS by turning off Volume Shadow Copy for virtual machines (applies to Acronis Cyber Backup 12.5 only — there is no such option in 11.7 or lower). With quiescing disabled, the VM will be backed up in crash-consistent state.

For Acronis Cyber Backup 11.7 and older products, try disabling the VSS component of VMware Tools to solve the issue, but only if the backed up VM does not run a database:

Click to expand instructions for Acronis Cyber Backup 11.7 and older products

null

Error: An error occurred while saving the snapshot: Failed to quiesce the virtual machine.
2016-12-13T15:20:46.251+03:00 [02752 error 'vmsnapshot' opID=0D3F1714-00000060-b1] [VmMo::ConsolidateDisks] Consolidate failed for VM MYVIRTUALMACHINE with error: vim.fault.InvalidSnapshotFormat

2016-12-13T16:59:00.941+03:00 [02736 error 'vmsnapshot' opID=0D3F1714-00000386-8b] [VmMo::ConsolidateDisks] Consolidate failed for VM MYVIRTUALMACHINE with error: vim.fault.FileLocked
2016-12-13T16:59:01.945+03:00 [02736 info 'Default' opID=0D3F1714-00000386-8b] [VpxLRO] -- ERROR task-74490 -- vm-13111 -- vim.VirtualMachine.consolidateDisks: vim.fault.FileLocked:
--> Result:
--> (vim.fault.FileLocked) {
-->    dynamicType = <unset>, 
-->    faultCause = (vmodl.MethodFault) null, 
-->    faultMessage = (vmodl.LocalizableMessage) [
-->       (vmodl.LocalizableMessage) {
-->          dynamicType = <unset>, 
-->          key = "msg.snapshot.vigor.consolidate.error", 
-->          arg = (vmodl.KeyAnyValue) [
-->             (vmodl.KeyAnyValue) {
-->                dynamicType = <unset>, 
-->                key = "1", 
-->                value = "msg.snapshot.error-DUPLICATEDISK", 
-->             }
-->          ], 
-->          message = "An error occurred while consolidating disks: One of the disks in this virtual machine is already in use by a virtual machine or by a snapshot.", 

2016-12-13T16:32:32.741+03:00 [05584 info 'Default' opID=0D3F1714-00000310-9c] [VpxLRO] -- ERROR task-74486 -- vm-13109 -- vim.vm.Snapshot.revert: vim.fault.InvalidSnapshotFormat:
--> Result:
--> (vim.fault.InvalidSnapshotFormat) {
-->    dynamicType = <unset>, 
-->    faultCause = (vmodl.MethodFault) null, 
-->    faultMessage = (vmodl.LocalizableMessage) [
-->       (vmodl.LocalizableMessage) {
-->          dynamicType = <unset>, 
-->          key = "msg.snapshot.vigor.revert.error", 
-->          arg = (vmodl.KeyAnyValue) [
-->             (vmodl.KeyAnyValue) {
-->                dynamicType = <unset>, 
-->                key = "1", 
-->                value = "msg.snapshot.error-NOTFOUND", 
-->             }
-->          ], 
-->          message = "An error occurred while reverting to a snapshot: A required file was not found.", 
-->       }
-->    ], 
-->    msg = "Detected an invalid snapshot configuration."
--> }
2016-12-13T16:32:24.034+03:00 [02736 info 'Default' opID=0D3F1714-0000030B-ea] [VpxLRO] -- ERROR task-74485 -- vm-13109 -- vim.vm.Snapshot.remove: vim.fault.FileNotFound:
--> Result:
--> (vim.fault.FileNotFound) {
-->    dynamicType = <unset>, 
-->    faultCause = (vmodl.MethodFault) null, 
-->    file = "[]", 
-->    msg = "File [] was not found", 
--> }
--> Args:

Hello everyone,

Begin I start, just want to clarify that I’m new to ESXi. I’ve built a secondary server for the specific purpose of testing out the features and making mistakes in order to learn. For the past few weeks I’ve been creating, editing and re-creating VMs on our host and learning along the way. The following issue arose after deleting hard drives from a VM. I had added two extra hard drives to a VM in order to understand how it worked, and after I had no more use for these two extra drives, I deleted them from the VM using the web UI. The process gave no errors, but I believe I made a rookie mistake by also deleting the extra vmdks from the datastore manually using the datastore explorer.

Now, after trying to create a snapshot of the VM, I’m getting this error:

An error occurred while saving the snapshot: A required file was not found.

An error occurred while taking the snapshot: A required file was not found.

Here’s the screenshot for reference. I’m assuming the file that can’t be found is a vmdk (which I thought wasn’t necessary since the hard drive had been removed).

In this state, the VM boots up normally with no errors. I just can’t take any further snapshots. I will appreciate all the help I can get.

Thank you!

vSphere ESXi 6.5, 6.7, 7.0 – Unable to take quiesced snapshot

On VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5, 6.7, and 7.0, a condition exists where one is unable to take a quiesced snapshot. This is an issue that effects quite a few people and numerous forum threads can be found on the internet by those searching for the solution.

This issues can occur both when taking manual snapshots of virtual machines when one chooses “Quiesce guest filesystem”, or when using snapshot based backup applications such as vSphere Data Protection (vSphere vDP), Veeam, or other applications that utilize quiesced snapshots.

The Issue

I experienced this problem on one of my test VMs (Windows Server 2012 R2), however I believe it can occur on newer versions of Windows Server as well, including Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019.

When this issue occurs, the snapshot will fail and the following errors will be present:

Performing standard troubleshooting, I restarted the VM, checked for VSS provider errors, and confirmed that the Windows Services involved with snapshots were in their correct state and configuration. Unfortunately this had no effect, and everything was configured the way it should be.

I also tried to re-install VMWare tools, which had no effect.

PLEASE NOTE: If you experience this issue, you should confirm the services are in their correct state and configuration, as outlined in VMware KB: 1007696. Source: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1007696

The Fix

In the days leading up to the failure when things were running properly, I did notice that the quiesced snapshots for that VM were taking a long time process, but were still functioning correctly before the failure.

This morning during troubleshooting, I went ahead and deleted all the Windows Volume Shadow Copies (VSS Snapshots) which are internal and inside of the Virtual Machine itself. These are the shadow copies that the Windows guest operating system takes on it’s own filesystem (completely unrelated to VMware).

To my surprise after doing this, not only was I able to create a quiesced snapshot, but the snapshot processed almost instantly (200x faster than previously when it was functioning).

If you’re comfortable deleting all your snapshots, it may also be a good idea to fully disable and then re-enable the VSS Snapshots on the volume to make sure they are completely deleted and reset.

I’m assuming this was causing a high load for the VMware snapshot to process and a timeout was being hit on snapshot creation which caused the issue. While Windows volume shadow copies are unrelated to VMware snapshots, they both utilize the same VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Service) system inside of windows to function and process. One must also keep in mind that the Windows volume shadow copies will of course be part of a VMware snapshot since they are stored inside of the VMDK (the virtual disk) file.

PLEASE NOTE: Deleting your Windows Volume Shadow copies will delete your Windows volume snapshots inside of the virtual machine. You will lose the ability to restore files and folders from previous volume shadow copy snapshots. Be aware of what this means and what you are doing before attempting this fix.

7 Responses to “vSphere ESXi 6.5, 6.7, 7.0 – Unable to take quiesced snapshot”

I am noticing very odd behaivor on 6.5. Basically I have a zfs zvol presented to esxi as an iscsi target via scst. For whatever reason when deleting a snapshot it causes a thin vmdk file to grow to its provisioned size.

for example i had a server using 700gb of data. The snopshot was 10gb. When i told vcenter to delete the 10gb snapshot it took hours and the vmdk grew to 4tb (the provisioned size). I was just curious if you have seen anything like this.

That’s actually crazy! I haven’t heard of, nor seen that happen.

I’m just curious, is your ESXi host running 6.5 fully patched (I think there’s been a few updates released that I’ve recently seen/deployed via vSphere Update Manager)?

Also, I’m just curious: Does SCST use/provide VAAI? Usually I see Lio-Target being used for iSCSI targets on Linux based storage hosts (since it provides multiple host access and VAAI)?

I’m actually not that familiar with SCST as far as VMware compatibility, VAAI, and clustered file system access on it…

Great catch on how Microsoft shadow copies impact VMWare snapshots. Helped to solve my problem. I think it is a “bug” on VMWare side and nobody reported it to VMWare (on not enough reports for them to spend time on fixing this problem). Technology….;)

I had the same issue but mine was an old backup agent on the machine.

Anything that interfaces, uses, or messes with the Windows VDS providers (such as your old backup agent), can cause this as well!

I had same issue . My Windows Shadow Copy does not activated so i tried another workaround
I powered off my Vm and select Proper ESXi (with Enough Resource for DSR check) and then Start Clone job and it works.

My issue was similar, but I worked out that my shadow copies were being taken exactly the same time as the snapshot was being created by the storage! So I altered the VSS times and its been fine ever since. But your article pointed me in the right directions, many thanks.

Источник

Job Fails Due to Quiesced Snapshot Creation Failure

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Challenge

A Backup or Replication job for a VMware Virtual Machine fails with either of the following errors:

Within the vSphere Environment the following error can be seen in the task list for the VM:

Cause

This error occurs when the VMware Environment fails to create the quiesced snapshot that was requested by Veeam Backup & Replication.

Veeam Backup & Replication will send the request for a quiesced snapshot only when the option «Enable VMware Tools quiescence» is enabled within the Backup/Replication job settings, and the VM that was being snapshoted was not processed using Application-Aware Processing.

Solution

VMware Provides the following troubleshooting article regarding issues with quiesced snapshot creation:

• You can reproduce the quiesced snapshot creation failure by manually creating a snapshot on the VM that fails to be processed, deselecting the option «Include virtual machine’s memory,» and enabling the «Quiesce guest file system» option.
• The option «Enable VMware tools quiescence» within Veeam backup/replication jobs is disabled by default (unchecked).
• For Windows-based systems, it is recommended to use «Enable application-aware processing» instead of VMware Tools Quiescence.

Источник

Knowledge Base

4559: Acronis product fails to back up a VMware virtual machine with «Creating a quiesced snapshot failed» or «An error occurred while quiescing the virtual machine»

Also read in:

use Google Translate

Applies to:

Operating Systems:

Last update: 11-08-2022

Try reinstalling or updating your VMware tools to fix the issue

Symptoms

1. You are using one of the Acronis Cyber Backup products on an ESX Host to back up virtual machines;
2. The backup of one or several of the virtual machines fails with an error message similar to one of the following:

An error occurred while saving the snapshot: Failed to quiesce the virtual machine. An error occurred while taking a snapshot: Failed to quiesce the virtual machine.

Creating a quiesced snapshot failed

An error occurred while quiescing the virtual machine. See the virtual machine’s event log for details.

VMware failed to create a quiesced snapshot of the selected virtual machine. To back up the machine, power off the machine before the process or uninstall the Volume Shadow Copy Services Support feature of VMware Tools from the VM.

Protocol error from VMX

An error occurred while saving the snapshot: A required file was not found.

Cause

Please see the solution section of this article for specific causes and resolution.

Solution

1.1 VM snapshot should work correctly

Acronis software uses snapshots executed by the hypervisor while taking the virtual machine backup. It is necessary that these snapshots work correctly. Create a virtual machine snapshot to check the consistency :

1. Open the vSphere connection to the ESX host.
2. Right click on the machine > take snapshot > check the «Quiesce guest file system»
3. Uncheck the «Snapshot the virtual machine’s memory» and click OK.

If taking quiesced snapshot fails, investigate the issue with the virtual machine (contact VMware support if needed)

In most cases, reinstalling/updating VMware tools and rebooting the virtual machine will resolve the issue with quiesced snapshot. Please see the following articles:

• VMware Knowledge Base Article 1009073
• VMware Knowledge Base Article 5962168
• VMware Knowledge Base Article 1007696
• VMware Knowledge Base Article 1007346
• VMware Knowledge Base Article 80246

If quiesced snapshot is created successfully but backup with Acronis still fails with the same error message, contact Acronis Support with a reference to this article

1.2 Verify VSS status

If you backup a virtual machine with transactional applications installed (SQL, Exchange evt.), then:

• VMware Tools should be installed inside that guest OS.
• VSS service should not be disabled inside the guest OS.

In case the guest OS event logs contain errors or warnings for VSS operations during creation of the snapshot, troubleshoot the VSS issues inside the guest OS.

If a virtual machine snapshot fails due to incorrect guest file system quiescing (snapshot without option Quiesce quest file system is successful), for virtual machines with no transcational applications installed you can workaround the issue by uninstalling the VMware Tools for the guest OS (see More information below) or by disabling Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) for Virtual Machines backup option (for Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud or Acronis Cyber Backup 12 and above) .

Keep in mind the VMware ESX(i) virtualization platform limitations:

• Agent for VMware backs up a fault tolerant machine only if fault tolerance was enabled in VMware vSphere 6.0 and later,
• VMware vSphere does not support snapshots of independent disks and Raw Device Mapping (RDM) disks in physical compatibility mode. To overcome these limitations install an agent into the guest OS.

1.3 If the error message is:

Creating a quiesced snapshot failed because the create snapshot operation exceeded the time limit for holding off I/O in the frozen virtual machine

Then see the following article for a solution: VMware Knowledge Base Article 1038963

If ESX(i) version is 6.0, install this patch .

The error may be caused by pre-backup command failure. A pre-backup command (pre-freeze script located in /usr/sbin/pre-freeze-script on a Linux machine or in a specific directory on a Windows machine) is a user-supplied script that should be executed before backup. Usually, these scripts are used to quiesce an application that does not have its own VSS provider (in Windows) to ensure a consistent state before backup. When such a script exits with a non-zero return code, this indicates that the script failed to perform its quiescing task and quiesced snapshot operation has to be cancelled.

See also the following solutions:

• If VM freezes during snapshot creation, see A virtual machine can freeze under load when you take quiesced snapshots or use custom quiescing scripts;
• If VM runs a database, try giving it more processors/RAM. Allow VM to use more of the host/cluster resources.

More information

Acronis Cyber Backup 12.5: If the backed up VM does not run a database, you can disable quiescing of VMs via VSS by turning off Volume Shadow Copy for virtual machines (applies to Acronis Cyber Backup 12.5 only — there is no such option in 11.7 or lower). With quiescing disabled, the VM will be backed up in crash-consistent state.

For Acronis Cyber Backup 11.7 and older products, try disabling the VSS component of VMware Tools to solve the issue, but only if the backed up VM does not run a database:

Click to expand instructions for Acronis Cyber Backup 11.7 and older products

Uninstall the Volume Shadow Copy Services Support feature of VMware Tools from the virtual machine:

1. Select the virtual machine in question on ESX server and go to Inventory -> Virtual Machine -> Install/Upgrade VMware Tools:
2. 
3. This will launch the installation of VMware Tools on the virtual machine:

Uncheck the Volume Shadow Copy Services Support:

Complete the modification:

Источник

10 hours ago, WiteWulf said:

I suspect the problem may be that you’ve used the «@» symbol in the name of your guest («DS@Work»), and ESXi doesn’t appear to be delimiting it when it applies the commands to take the snapshot.

Unfortunately this does not seem to be the case.. i created a new VM with the exact same settings and used DSTEST as the name. Still get the same error…

I used the latesr ARPL image and other than that the rest seem to be standard items for ESXI (all disks are SATA)…

Is therea any other idea on how i could start to trace the issue? 

Create Snapshot

Key: haTask-11-vim.VirtualMachine.createSnapshot-2117

Description: Create a new snapshot of this virtual machine

Virtual machine: DSTEST

State: Failed — A specified parameter was not correct: spec.deviceChange.device

Errors

An error occurred while saving the snapshot: One of the parameters supplied is invalid.

An error occurred while saving snapshot file «/vmfs/volumes/635684b8-fc88458f-35c4-1c8341301fbf/DSTEST/DSTEST-Snapshot1.vmsn».

An error occurred while taking a snapshot: One of the parameters supplied is invalid.