Snapshots are great and very powerful feature of VMware’s ESX Server.
Snapshots let you preserve the state of a VMWareVirtual Machine (VM) so you can return to the same state repeatedly.
A snapshot captures the entire state of a virtual machine at the time you take the snapshot. This includes the settings state, the disk state and the memory state.
The settings state contains the VMWare virtual machine settings. The disk state contains the state of all the virtual machine’s virtual disks. The memory state represents the contents of the virtual machine’s memory. Capturing the memory state is optional. So if you make some changes, and they break things, you know, or something goes wrong, or you just want to go back to a particular point in time, you can with snapshots.
Snapshots let you preserve the state of a virtual machine so you can return to the same state repeatedly.
So let’s take a look at making some snapshots. What I’m going to do here, is I’m going to open up a console on this Virtual Server (hosted on a VMWare ESX 4.1). To do that I’m going to right-click on my Windows 2008 virtual machine and select Open Console.
