We have Symantec Backup Exec running on all of our computers including the VM server with host and all the guests running them. We have full backups scheduled for one day at week but on that day it didn't complete the backup because we added the VM server to it and it couldn't backup the VM files. I was talking to a friend of mine who runs ESX and he told me the best way to do this is to create a snapshot then run the backup of the directory those are in. Is there a way I can automatically do this? Or is the way I'm going to have to do it to shut down all the guest servers then backup the directories they are at? Is there some kind of a script or something that would automatically do this since backups are done at night after work hours?