ESX Virtual Machines fail to quiesce with (0x8000ffff) error (79960)

Date – 03/2010
Affected Product & Version – NetVault: Backup 8.x
Affected Module & Version – VMware APM 1.x
OS Version – VM guest OS Windows 2003
Application Information – n/a

Description:
One of the many ways that a Virtual Machine can fail to quiesce during a VMware plugin backup can be due to OS issues on the VM. In this example, there is an inconsistency when attempting to contact shadow copy service writers.

Symptoms:
The backup for the VM will show the following 2 job messages for the problem VM:
Proceeding to quiesce the guest within VM '[VM name]' uuid ‘[uuid]’
Guest quiesced successfully = FALSE
Failed to quiesce the guest within VM '[VM name]' uuid ‘[uuid]’

The context for the “Guest quiesced successfully = FALSE” message shows:
[date] Calling SetBackupState()
[date] Calling SetContext()
[date] Error in c:\veena\GENUS_2009APR20_802214\nvappsnap\nvappsnap.cpp(203). Call gpComBackupComponents->SetContext(VSS_CTX_BACKUP) returned <Unknown> (0x8000ffff)
[date] Failed to complete!

One of the functions of nvappsnap.cpp is to access the shadow copy service writers. In this situation, manually running the command “vssadmin list writers” on the VM will also result in the error (0x8000ffff).

According to Microsoft, this error may occur due to a registry key corruption.
Follow the following Microsoft knowledge base article to resolve:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940184