Fix for VMWare vSphere (ESXi) Snapshot Creation Failure with “msg.snapshot.error-QUIESCING-ERROR” message

by | Jun 15, 2017 | Technical Nuggets

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Are you having trouble with VMWare vSphere (ESXi) 5.5 creating a simple snapshot on a linux box? Getting an error message of “msg.snapshot.error-QUIESCING-ERROR”? We were with several new Ubuntu VPS systems we setup recently.

After some research, we found the following workaround that seems to work well. This information is available elsewhere, but this distills it down and puts the simple essentials in one place so you know what really needs to be done.

  1. Power off the VM
  2. Add the following to the end of the virtual machine’s .VMX file (or if disk.EnableUUID setting exists, change it): 
         disk.EnableUUID = "FALSE"

    This entry per: VMWare Knowledge Base Article 2079220

  3. Power on the VM, login and then add: 
         [vmbackup]
     enableSyncDriver = false

    to /etc/vmware-tools/tools.conf

That’s it. We made these changes and the snapshot creation began working immediately.

For completeness, this fix was done under the following conditions:

  • ESXi 5.5 Update 3 Build 5230635 (Host)
  • Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS 64-bit (Guest)