Troubleshooting › Virtual Machine Backup and Restore Related › Disable the Consecutive Snapshot Creation in VMware VM for a Backup

Disable the Consecutive Snapshot Creation in VMware VM for a Backup

In the previous version of Arcserve UDP, when multiple VMware VM backup jobs start at the same time, the jobs create snapshots on the ESX host in parallel to jobs. Sometimes such parallel snapshot creation operations increase the disk I/O on the ESX host. To avoid such situation, by default Arcserve UDP Version 6.0 serialize the snapshot creation operation when the jobs are running on the same proxy server and the snapshot creation operation is for the same ESX host. In other words, the snapshot creation operation occurs one after another and ideally there is only one snapshot created at a time. But this is not applicable if the backup jobs are running on different proxy servers, or the backup jobs are for different ESX hosts.

To avoid a situation where the snapshot creation of one job hangs (or takes very long time) and the next jobs are blocked, the next job will wait for the previous snapshot creation operation for at most five minutes. After five minutes, the next snapshot creation process starts.

You can disable the behavior of waiting for five minutes by following these steps:

1. Log in to the proxy server.
2. Open the registry key from the following location:

   [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Arcserve\Unified Data Protection\Engine\AFBackupDll]
   

3. Create a DWORD value with the name CreateSnapshotSequentially.
4. Set the value to 0.

In addition, you can also change the default timeout value (five minutes) by following these steps:

1. Log in to the proxy server.
2. Open the registry key from the following location:

   [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Arcserve\Unified Data Protection\Engine\AFBackupDll]
   

3. Create a DWORD value with the name CreateSnapshotTimeout.
4. Set the value with a number.

   The unit is in seconds.