snapshots and Hyper-V

April 24, 2009 | 5 comments

One of the greatest things about virtual machines is the ability to take snapshots, which can be used to quickly roll a VM back to a known state. Previously, I have written about some of the shortcomings with Microsoft’s Hyper-V snapshots.  Or were they checkpoints?  I forget… but that’s not important.  The main problem with [...]

January 6, 2009 | No comments

Unlike VMware ESX, when administrators delete snapshots on Hyper-V, the disks are not merged until the VM is powered off -- potentially filling up disks.

December 19, 2008 | 1 comment

Virtual machine snapshots are a quick way to recover from unexpected incompatibilities you may encounter when patching guest operating systems.  In fact, VMware Update Manager even provides an option to automatically snapshot a VM before applying updates and then delete the snapshot after a specified amount of time. Even if you are not using VMware [...]

December 18, 2008 | 1 comment

Although the Hyper-V Manager and SCVMM allow removing snapshots from running VMs, they are not actually merged until the VM is powered off.

December 3, 2008 | 1 comment

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: What’s the difference between a checkpoint and a snapshot?