A VM with snapshots usually has bad performance because you are doubling IOPS and there is CPU overhead in calculating the block-level difference. It’s fine to use snapshots on test or dev VMs, but don’t use them on production VMs. VM snapshots take up significant space, so you should limit yourself to 2 or 3 of them.
Click Since the Patch 2 snapshot does not have the machine’s memory, you will have to start the VM manually. The snapshot manager screen will indicate where you are within the snapshot tree. Note that you’ll get a message saying that the “current state of the virtual machine will be lost unless it is saved in a snapshot.” This means that if you have made any changes to the VM and have not saved them by creating a snapshot, your work will be lost. To revert to a snapshot, from the snapshot manager, choose one of the snapshots (for example Patch 2) and click Revert To.ģ. If we revert to a snapshot with a green icon, the VM will be in running state.ġ. The figure below shows several snapshots to choose from. If you check this box and the VM is running when you take a snapshot, the icon of the snapshot will be green.Ĥ. If you check the “Snapshot the virtual machine’s memory” option, the snapshot will also record the VM’s memory. It is recommended to include a detailed description of what has been done to the VM or how the VM is configured.ģ. In the pop-up window, enter a name and description for the snapshot. Alternatively, you can select VM > Actions > Snapshots > Take snapshot.Ģ. Access the VMware vSphere snapshot manager by right-clicking on a VM, and then click Create Snapshot. This is supported in vSphere 5.0 and later.ġ. Consolidate - Merges the hierarchy of redo logs.
Revert to Latest Snapshot - Reverts to the most recent snapshot for the VM.This is the same as the “Go To” option under the Snapshot Manager in the vSphere/VI client. Revert to Snapshot - Changes the execution state of a virtual machine to the state of the selected snapshot.If the virtual machine does not have any snapshots, this operation simply returns successfully. Remove All Snapshots - Removes all snapshots associated with a virtual machine.Remove Snapshot - Removes a snapshot and deletes any associated storage.You can take a snapshot when a virtual machine is powered on, powered off or suspended. Create Snapshot - Creates a new snapshot of a virtual machine, which becomes the current snapshot.You can use the vSphere web client to take new snapshots, delete snapshots and more. vmsd file - This is a database file that contains VMs snapshot information and all the relationships between snapshots and between delta disks for each snapshot. As explained above, if you don’t capture the state of memory, the “revert to snapshot” operation will restore the virtual machine to a non-running state and it will have to be restarted manually. vmsn file - This is an optional file that saves the memory of the VM. The descriptor and flat files are also called redo logs. The delta disk is composed from two files: a small descriptor file and a file that contains the raw data. -delta.vmdk - A delta disk (also called child disk) is the difference between the current state of the virtual disk and the state that existed at the time that the previous snapshot was taken.vmdk file - This is a machine file to which the guest operating system (OS) can write. When you take a snapshot, the operation triggers the creation of the following files: What files are created when I take a snapshot?