Snapshot with quiesce option fails and kills VM on ESXi 4.1

Binary package hint: open-vm-tools

I recently upgraded from ESX4u2 to ESX4.1, and since then snapshots of Lucid VMs go wrong. This surfaced because we use VCB to make backups of our VMs, and this process includes making a quiesced snapshot. Done manually from the ESX console shows:

~ # time vim-cmd vmsvc/snapshot.create 128 TestSnap Blah 0 1
Create Snapshot:
Create snapshot failed
real 0m 16.29s
user 0m 0.23s
sys 0m 0.00s

The bad thing is that it leaves the VM in an unusable state, with lots of these on the console:

task xxx:123 blocked for more than 120 seconds.
"echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this.

The VM has to be hard reset at this point.

The tools from the VMware provided tar installer (VMwareTools-8.3.2-257589.tar.gz) work fine, i.e. with those installed I am able to make a quiesced snapshot without problems:

~ # time vim-cmd vmsvc/snapshot.create 176 TestSnap Vmware_tar_tools 0 1
Create Snapshot:
real 0m 2.91s
user 0m 0.21s
sys 0m 0.00s

As a workaround, I have now reconfigured the backup regime to not use queiscing for Ubuntu Lucid VMs ("-Q 0" option for VCB's vcbmounter.exe).