On the Linux guest operating systems, the configuration setting excludedFileSystems allows file systems to be excluded from a quiesced snapshot operation. This setting, if specified, is listed in the section of vmbackup of the tools.conf file.

The value of excludedFileSystems is a comma-separated list of glob-style patterns specifying the file systems to be excluded from quiesced snapshots. The patterns may use '*' (wildcard) to represent any string of characters and '?" (joker) to represent any single character. Note that the characters represented by these patters, '*' and '?" may include any characters, including '/'

Procedure

  1. Open the tools.conf file from /etc/vmware-tools/tools.conf in your Linux guest operating system.
  2. Add a vmbackup section in the file, if it does not exist. 
    [vmbackup]
  3. In the vmbackup section, set excludedFileSystems to the preferred list of patterns. 
    excludedFileSystems = <list of patterns>

Example

For example, this setting excludes the file system mounted at /fs1 from a quiesced snapshot operation. 
[vmbackup]
excludedFileSystems = /fs1
As another example, this setting excludes all the file systems whose mount points start with /fs or /dev from a quiesced snapshot operation. 
[vmbackup]
excludedFileSystems = /fs*,/dev/*