With snapshots, you can preserve the state of a virtual machine so that you can return to the same state repeatedly. A snapshot captures the entire state of a virtual machine at the time you take the snapshot.

The vSphere Web Client and the vSphere Client provide several operations for creating and managing virtual machine snapshots and snapshot chains. You can create snapshots, revert to any snapshot in the chain, and remove snapshots. You can create extensive snapshot trees to save the virtual machine state at any point in time, and restore the virtual machine later if necessary.

A snapshot preserves the following information:

Snapshots operate on individual virtual machines. In a group of virtual machines, taking a snapshot preserves only the state of the active virtual machine.

When you revert to a snapshot, you return the virtual machine state and the virtual machine data to the state they were in at the time you took that snapshot. If you want the virtual machine to be suspended, powered on, or powered off when you start it, ensure that it is in the state you want when you take that snapshot.

Snapshots let you revert repeatedly to the same state without creating multiple virtual machines. With snapshots, you create backup and restore positions in a linear process. You can also preserve a baseline before diverging a virtual machine in a snapshot tree.

Do not use snapshots as virtual machine backups. Snapshots provide a point-in-time image of the disk that backup solutions can use. Large numbers of snapshots are difficult to manage, take up large amounts of disk space, and are not protected in the case of hardware failure. Backup solutions, like VMware Data Recovery, use the snapshot mechanism to freeze the state of a virtual machine. The Data Recovery backup method has capabilities that mitigate the limitations of snapshots.

You can use snapshots as restoration points during a linear or iterative process, such as installing update packages, or during a branching process, such as installing different versions of a program. Taking snapshots ensures that each installation begins from an identical baseline