Creating and Managing Hyper-V Snapshots

In this chapter of Hyper-V Essentials, the creation and management of virtual machine snapshots will be covered.

What is a Hyper-V Virtual Machine Snapshot?

Hyper-V virtual machine snapshots allow the status of a virtual machine (and the guest operating system) at a particular time to be saved such that it can be reverted to that state at any point in the future. Hyper-V snapshots contain both the configuration settings of the virtual machine, and the state of the guest operating system at the point the snapshot is taken. Snapshots may be taken of virtual machines when they are running, stopped or saved. It is not possible, however, to take a snapshot of a paused Hyper-V virtual machine.

When a snapshot is taken of a saved or running virtual machine, the snapshot contains the status of both the file system and the memory used by the gust operating system. As such, when the virtual machine is reverted to the snapshot everything, including applications running at the time the snapshot was taken, will be restored to the snapshot status.

Virtual machines are reverted to a snapshot status by applying the desired snapshot to the virtual machine.

Taking Hyper-V Virtual Machine Snapshots

Snapshots may be taken of a virtual machine using a number of different approaches.