snapshots

February 26, 2010 | 15 comments

VMware ESX 4 can virtualize itself, and by using a special undocumented configuration setting it is now possible to take snapshots of virtual VMware ESX 4 systems.

October 1, 2009 | 17 comments

VMware vSphere 4 offers thin provisioned virtual disks backed by management that enables safe use in a production environment thanks to advanced accounting of all provisioned space.

June 25, 2009 | 2 comments

Snapshots have always been a powerful feature of VMware ESX — even in production deployments.  There are tons of innovative tools and scripts out there to monitor snapshots — just check out this new one from Virtu-Al. If you happen to want a simple, built-in way to monitor your snapshots in VMware vSphere 4, look no [...]

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 the [...]

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 Update [...]

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?