I'm a long-time user of Macrium Reflect Workstation for my backups. I just installed VMware Workstation Pro 14 a few days ago, after upgrading from 10 (which had gone unused for a few years, during which time I adopted Macrium Reflect).
Well, when backups ran the evening after I started using Workstation Pro, I got this in my backup report:
| Creating Volume Snapshot - Please Wait |
| |
| Failed: | Failed - 0x8000ffff - Retrying without VSS Writers |
| | Success |
This happened two nights in a row. Last night, I turned off the VMware virtual machines, and my backups are back to running without any errors at all.
The people in the Macrium forums say that VMware needs to write and include a VSS writer to solve this problem.
Where do I go from here? Being unable to back up your system (or at least the virtual machine part of it) whist virtual machines are active is entirely unacceptable.
I've done some digging, and this is not strictly a Macrium problem. Someone using Acronis had the same issue, and they were told to exclude the virtual machine storage directory, which is utter bollocks. VMware needs to cough up a polished solution to this issue. It's that, or I can stop recommending VMware. People are actually recommending the nightmare which is Hyper-V to get around this, as they provide VSS writers. Much as I loathe Hyper-V, I find this inability to properly back up a system without errors/warnings if a virtual machine is running to be intolerable.
I'd appreciate a response from VMware, who have -so- felt that they don't have to deal with their customers that I cannot find a direct phone number for support. Strike two against them.
