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Backup of Machine running a VM

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Hi all:

I installed Acronis Backup 12.0 earlier this year (I've since updated to the 12.5 build 7970).

 

It's mostly working, but one machine in particular is still having problems.  Like many of my machines, the machine with problems is running a virtual machine (VMWare).  Unlike the other machines running VMs, this one is running a particularly important VM: It is running a Domain Controller that is implemented as a VM.

 

Those of you who are savvy with Domain Controllers will probably know this, but you shouldn't really implement a VM as a Domain Controller.  At least that's what I've since been told, but I was new to this, and my architecture just ended up this way.

 

Still, everything with the domain controller works great EXCEPT: Acronis Backup 12.5 fails when backing up the computer when the VM is running.  I tried several trials where I shut-down the domain controller, and each time Acronis runs successfully.  

 

When the Acronis Backup fails, it says it failed due to high disk activity.  But this domain controller has VERY LOW activity.  There are only 5 users and perhaps 2-3 logins per day to the domain.  The disk activity is very low both on the host and on the virtual machine.  In contrast, I have other VERY active computers that handle massive amounts of continuous reading/writing - and these machines backup just fine.

 

The basic error message is this: "The shadow copy provider timed out while flushing data to the volume being shadow copied. This is probably due to excessive activity on the volume. Try again later when the volume is not being used so heavily."  Logs are also attached.

 

Can anyone suggest a way I could get this working?

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Hi,

The "The shadow copy provider timed out while flushing data to the volume being shadow copied. This is probably due to excessive activity on the volume. Try again later when the volume is not being used so heavily." error is returned from the VSS service from the machine which you try to back up (likely caused by the fact that there is VM runnining inside this machine). In general such issues should be troubleshoot by checking the Windows event logs for corresponding VSS errors and looking for Microsoft KB articles. One possible solution is to increase the shadow storage (vssadmin resize shadowstorage) , but to get the exact solution additional investigation will be required which can be done with our support team involved.

P.S. Backup of this machine will be possible if you disable VSS option in the backup options, so that snapshot process does not rely on Microsoft VSS and is performed solely by Acronis SnapAPI driver, but in this case the state of the system inside the backup will be crash-consistent (like the machine was forcibly powered off).

Thank you.