SUMMARY
Steps to resolve issue where shadow copies of a volume are aborted due to shadow copy storage volume not present.
ISSUE
In order to appropriately capture an application consistent backup of the virtual machines, a snapshot of the host triggers an equivalent snapshot in the guest operating system of the virtual machine being backed up. We have observed that if the guest virtual machine is not appropriately configured for shadow copy storage, this error may occur:
"The shadow copies of volume \\?\Volume{0cb23f5e-d66f-11dd-aa0c-cd6941b8c127} were aborted because the shadow copy storage volume was not present."
0xe000fed1 - A failure occurred querying the writer status. Writer Name: Microsoft Hyper-V, Writer ID: {66841CD4-6DED-4F4B-8F17-FD23F8DDC3DE}, Last error: The VSS Writer failed, but the operation can be retried (0x800423f3), State: Failed during post-snapshot operation (11).
The System Event Logs on the host (physical machine) show:
Event type: ERROR
Event source: Volsnap
Event ID: 32
RESOLUTION
In order to address the issue, shadow copy storage must be created for the guest virtual machines that are being backed up. The VSS Shadow Storage may need to be associated with each NTFS volume within the guest virtual machines. This can be done by performing a command similar to the one below for each volume in each virtual machine that supports the assignment of VSS Shadow Storage:
Example:
vssadmin add shadowstorage /for=c: /on=c: /MaxSize=20%
(/for = Specifies the volume for which the shadow copy storage association is to be added.
/on = Specifies the volume to be used as storage for the volume that is defined in the /for parameter.
/MaxSize sets the total allowed amount of storage used for shadowstorage, Microsoft's best practice is 20% of total size of drive)
Re-run the backup
CAUSE
VSS Shadow Storage is not properly configured.