Comments on: Hyper-V snapshots: not for production

By: Be carefull with shapshots in Hyper-V « UP2V

Be carefull with shapshots in Hyper-V « UP2V — Fri, 22 May 2009 11:39:29 +0000

[...] Gray of vCritical.com has an opinion about this [...]

By: Eric Gray

Eric Gray — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 02:40:27 +0000

Etienne, great point about XenServer, I’m sure that comes as a surprise to many people. VMware ESX snapshots are storage-independent.

By: Etienne Pouliot

Etienne Pouliot — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 01:53:03 +0000

I totally agree with you. Furthermore, that’s exactly the same reason I do not recommend Xenserver. You don’t get snapshots with Xenserver unless you are connected to a Dell or a NetApp SAN (Details in blog (in french)). In my mind, VMware is the only “production ready” virtualization product.

By: Eric Gray

Eric Gray — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:51:56 +0000

Shawn, thanks for the comment. Yes, it is as you describe — the existing snapshot file just keeps growing until you power the VM off. When Microsoft says not recommended for production, they are not kidding!

I’m glad you find the VCritical articles useful, good idea to write up a summary page on the topic. I’ll consider it.

By: Shawn

Shawn — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:26:41 +0000

If you create a Hyper-V snapshot, a snapshot file is created and grows as changes are made to the VM. If I then decide to delete that snapshot, (merge not revert) the changes are not merged until the VM is powered off.
Thats easy to understand, but where are the writes happening between the time I ‘delete’ the snapshot and the VM being powered off and the merge happens. Do they continue against the snapshot file, causing it to continue to still grow? That is just retarded if that is the case. What if the reason I ‘deleted’ the snaphot was because of space constraints? Will I have to suffer downtime to poweroff the VM because of this?

On another note – I would do this but I’m lazy
You should compile a list with brief description and links, for each of these little issues with Hyper-V and SCVMM youve blogged about over the past months. This allow those of us in pre-sales roles to give customers looking at a Hyper-V solution complete facts about what they may be getting themselves into. Not everything is in the feature/price comparison, day to day operational issue matter as well.