Q. Is application-consistent quiescing supported on all types of VMware disks?

A. With vSphere 4.1, the short answer is no. I recently discussed vSphere v4.1's new support for application-consistent quiescing for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machines (VMs). However, even though that support is available, it functions only for VMs that use only SCSI disks. IDE virtual disks aren't supported, nor are disks configured as dynamic disks inside the VM.

Note also that there must be a number of free SCSI slots in the VM equal to the number of SCSI disks. If enough free SCSI slots aren't available, application-consistent quiescing will fail.