IGT Part 5: Hyper-V snapshots are not gone until the VM is powered off

January 6, 2009 in Virtualizationism by Eric Gray | No comments

This article is part of a series on Incoming Google Traffic (IGT).

Evidently, some Hyper-V administrators are puzzled by that platform’s snapshot behavior. I am starting to see visitors come to VCritical when searching for:

hyper-v “merge in progress”
hyper-v “paused-critical”

This is exactly the issue that I wrote about recently. With VMware ESX, administrators can create and delete snapshots on running VMs — without incurring downtime. Deleted Hyper-V snapshots are only merged when the VM is powered off. That could mean twice the number of reboots during VM guest OS maintenence.