Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Before starting to use snapshots, be aware that vSphere FT—discussed in Chapter 7,
“Ensuring High Availability and Business Continuity”—does not support snapshots, so you
can't take a snapshot of a VM that is protected with vSphere FT. Earlier versions of vSphere
did not allow Storage vMotions to occur when a snapshot was present, but this limitation is
removed in vSphere 5.
Perform the following steps to create a snapshot of a VM:
1.
Use the vSphere Web Client to connect to a vCenter Server instance or use the vSphere
Client to connect to an individual ESXi host.
2.
Navigate to either the Hosts And Clusters or VMs And Templates inventory view.
3.
Right-click the VM in the inventory tree and select Take Snapshot.
4.
Provide a name and description for the snapshot, as shown in Figure 9.28, and then
click OK.
Figure 9.28
Providing names
and descriptions
for snapshots is an
easy way to manage
multiple historical
snapshots.
As shown in Figure 9.28, there are two options when taking snapshots:
The option labeled Snapshot The Virtual Machine's Memory specii es whether the RAM of
the VM should also be included in the snapshot. When this option is selected, the current
contents of the VM's RAM are written to a i le ending in a .vmsn i lename extension.
◆
◆
The option labeled Quiesce Guest File System (Needs VMware Tools Installed) controls
whether the guest i le system will be quiesced— or quieted—so that it is considered
