You are wrong. VSS is not able to take application consistent backups. What VSS can do? Do you know what VSS does at all? It flushes disks, takes point-in-time snapshot with open-files read-write with VSS writer, quiescenes windows operating system databases, MS SQL and Exchange. And thats all. But I dont have Exchange or SQL. I have instead some brand server software there. Its even Linux based embedded VM, all-in-one or on-the-box. It donkt know nothing about VSS. It even dont know nothing about VMWare tools - there is no vmware tools at all. Or the tools are outdated and there is no any possibility to insert them, because all stuff in on-the-box and any external action is strongly prohibited. But VSS it dont have anyway, because its not windows. The only possibility to backup it is to take vmware snapshot together with VM memory dump.....Do you know at all that VSS is microsoft windows technology only. Also, some servers are BSD or pure Unix based. VMWare dont have "tools" for them, and if they have, then server is enough protected and dont allow any installation, vmware even dont know where to install and what, because OS is unknown.
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