#Shadowscript how to#
#Shadowscript install#
#Shadowscript upgrade#

If that is not a requirement, then LMHSysAdmins' fix will save a bunch of time, as well as a VM reboot and allow a file-system consistient backup. Whichever method you use, a freeze script that kicks off VSS will be necessary to get an application-consistent backup. I added the freeze script and now it does. I tried disabling the service and running a backup job on a VM that I had not done the freeze script fix on and it does indeed let the job run and complete with no errors, but the Windows event logs don't show any VSS activity. I never could get that to work and ended up back on the fix I wrote about on my blog.

#Shadowscript install#

The fix was to uninstall the service by modifying the VMware Tools install and then reinstalling it.

I know in vSphere 4.1 there was an issue where this service was not installed correctly when VMware Tools was installed. As a result, quiescing will be disabled and you will not have an application-consistient backup of the VM. This essentially the same as setting disk.enableUUID to false. Someone may correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe disabling the VMware Snapshot Provider service will prevent VSS from running when a snapshot is made. I would be careful disabling that service.

I'll probably be writing a tutorial on this tonight or tomorrow.

#Shadowscript upgrade#

disk.enableUUID = true has rarely worked for me and usually after an upgrade of either vSphere or 3rd party backup software everything breaks. I wonder when VMware and backup software developers are going to figure this out and just include this in their documentation. It also tells me that a backup has been competed and transaction logs are being truncated for the SQL server. Event logs tell me MS SQL is freezing I/O and I can see the VSS agent start and stop. vSphere 5.1 is out Among the enhancements is the new VMware Data Protection appliance that provides basic VM backups, deduplication, and file-level restore capabilities. I've tested this on two of my VMs and it's working.

#Shadowscript how to#

If this helps I may write another blog post on how to do this for VDP. The steps should be about the same in this scenario except you don't need to delete the disk.enableUUID line from the VM config.

Here's a link to my blog post on how I fixed it in vRanger. No one with VMware or Quest Software could tell me how to make it work and I figured this out on my own. I went around in circles with this back when I was a vRanger user and they had horrible documentation. This will make Windows initiate Microsoft's VSS and freeze I/O while a snapshot is made instead of VMware's. The Windows 2008 SDK has an executable called vshadow.exe (one for 64bit, one for 32bit versions) that can be called from a freeze script in the backupscripts.d folder in your VMware Tools folder. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you can still get an application consistent backup with disk.enableUUID set to 'false'. This font includes a full set of lovely uppercase and lowercase letters, multilingual symbols, numerals and punctuation.