Delete a Snapshot in the vSphere Web Client

You can use the Snapshot Manager to delete snapshots for a virtual machine.

When you delete a snapshot, the changes between snapshots and previous disk states are merged. All the data from the delta disk that contains the information about the deleted snapshot is written to the parent disk and merges with the base disk.

Deleting snapshots involves large amounts of disk input and output, which can reduce virtual machine performance until consolidation is complete.

The time it takes to commit or delete snapshots depends on how much data the guest operating system has written to the virtual disks since the last snapshot was taken. The required time is directly proportional to the amount of data (committed or deleted) and the amount of RAM allocated to the virtual machine.

Prerequisites

Required Privilege: Virtual machine.State.Remove Snapshot on the virtual machine.

Procedure

Select a virtual machine.

■	In the virtual machines and templates inventory tree, select a group of virtual machines and select a virtual machine from the list on the right.
■	Search for a virtual machine and select it from the search results list.

Right-click the virtual machine and select Snapshot > Snapshot Manager.

In the Snapshot Manager, click a snapshot to select it.

Select whether to delete a single snapshot or all snapshots.

Option	Description
Delete	Permanently removes a snapshot from vCenter Server. Commits the snapshot data to the parent and removes the selected snapshot.
Delete All	Permanently removes all snapshots from the virtual machine. Commits all of the immediate snapshots before the You are here current state to the base disk and removes all existing snapshots for that virtual machine.

Click Yes in the confirmation dialog box.

Click Close to exit the Snapshot Manager.