VMware Snapshots

              A disk snapshot is a copy of the virtual machine disk file at a certain point in time. It preserves the disk file system and system memory of your virtual machine

Name – Name for the snapshot.

Description – Description of the snapshot.

Snapshot the virtual machine’s memory – All the memory in active use on the virtual machine is written to a memory dump file (vmsn file) that is included in the snapshot.

Quiesce guest file system (Needs VMware Tools installed) –it’s used to pause running processes on the guest operating system so that file system contents are in a known consistent state when you take the snapshot.

You can only take the snapshot when VM is powered

                      To quiesce is to put a computer, a program, a thread , or some other computer resource into a temporarily inactive or inhibited state

VMware recommends the following best practices regarding snapshots:

•  Do not keep a single snapshot for more than 72 hours. While VMware supports up to 32 snapshots in a chain, try to limit chains to three snapshots.
•  Do not rely upon snapshots for I/O intensive VMs with rapid data changes, because significant data inconsistencies will occur when the VM is restored.