Restore, live browse, or GUI mount of application-aware snapshots fail with error "VSS software snap not found"

Symptom

Restore, live browse, or GUI mount of application snapshots on Windows hosts might fail. The following error appears in the Job Pending Reason (JPR) and the CVMA.log file.

VSS software snap not found

Application snapshots are contained in the VSA hardware snapshot that is created by an application-aware backup job.

Cause

This issue can occur in the following cases:

Volumes on the disks from the VSA backup that are attached to the mount host during the application snapshot mount do not come online automatically.
The VSS software snapshot is not found because VSS marked it as a stale entry.

Resolution

Perform the restore, live browse, or GUI mount of application snapshots.

For a restore, specify the VSA proxy with the Use Proxy option on the Data Path tab of the Advanced Restore Options dialog box.
If the operation still fails, perform these additional steps:
1. On the mount host or VSA proxy where the application snapshot is being mounted, enable automount by running the following command from the Windows command prompt:
```
diskpart> automount enable
```
  By default, the snapshot is mounted on the destination application client for the restore.
2. The shadow storage for a VSS snapshot of an application volume must be associated to the same volume as the volume being snapped.
  
  Use the vssadmin add shadowstorage command to set the shadow storage association for a volume on guest VMs. The following example for an application that resides on volume D: specifies that volume D: is to be used for storage and that the maximum size for storage space should be 900 MB:
```
vssadmin add shadowstorage /for=D: /on=d: /maxsize=900mb
```
3. Retry the operation.