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, VSA proxy, or source VM 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.
If the operation still fails, perform these additional steps:
1. Perform an out-of-place restore of the full VM.
2. On the restored VM, manually revert VSS shadows on all of the VM disks:
  
  Run the following commands from the command prompt and identify the list of shadow copy IDs for each disk using the creation timestamp:
```
diskshadow
list shadows all
```
  Run the following command for each shadow copy ID:
```
 
revert shadow_copy_id
```
3. Manually restore data from the restored VM to the destination VM using the database dump files.
For future application-aware backups, consider one of the following solutions:
- To use hypervisor application-consistent snapshots instead of VSS shadows for application-aware backups of Hyper-V VMs, add the nEnableHypervisorAppConsistentBackup additional setting to the VSA proxy, as shown in the following table.
  
  Note
  
  This does not apply to the VMware Hypervisor. For VMware, the hypervisor level application consistent VM snapshot is taken during the backup by default.
  
  For instructions about adding an additional setting from the CommCell Console, see Adding or Modifying Additional Settings from the CommCell Console.
  
  Property
  
  Value
  
  Name
  
  nEnableHypervisorAppConsistentBackup
  
  Category
  
  VirtualServer
  
  Type
  
  Integer
  
  Value
  
  1
- Instead of performing application-aware backups, deploy an in-guest agent for backups of application data.

Property	Value
Name	nEnableHypervisorAppConsistentBackup
Category	VirtualServer
Type	Integer
Value	1