Whatever you call them in VMware circles, they are known as “Snapshots”, in Microsoft circles, Hyper-V they are known as “Checkpoints”.
Snapshots are evil things, I wrote an Article last year on Experts Exchange called – HOW TO: VMware Snapshots :- Be Patient,
the following two clients, clearly had not read my article, but they have now!
VMware vSphere Exchange Virtual Machine with two snapshots, one snapshot size of 250GB, with a parent disk of 500GB. Exchange performance would have been poor, this snapshot has been present for many months, and eventually took 33 hours to delete, ,merge and commit the snapshot, with 33 hours of Exchange downtime!
Microsoft Hyper-V Virtual Machine, with 9 nested snapshots, totally 170GB, more of an issue, performance is poor, and deleting these snapshots will cause issues, and delay!
The one thing you need to know about Snapshots, is if you use them, or find a virtual machine using one is Be Patient, if you decide to delete them!!!
It can take a very long time, for the process to complete and merge the child (delta) disk into the parent disk.
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