New features in virtual machine snapshots in Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V |
Friday, 19 June 2009
by Michel Roth
|
In Windows Server 2008 R2 there are some surgical changes to the
way virtual machine snapshots work and how they are exposed in the
system. These are the changes ( I like the one about exporting
snapshots!)
You can now export a single snapshot from a virtual
machine. This works by selecting the snapshot in question
and then selecting Export… from the Action pane. We
will merge all the snapshot disk data into a single new virtual
hard disk – and the resulting exported virtual machine will
look like a virtual machine with no snapshots that is identical to
the snapshot you selected. Note that the virtual machine
needs to be turned off in order to perform this operation.
Snapshot AVHD files are now created in the same directory as
their parent VHD files. Their names have also been
updated to include the name of the parent virtual hard disk.
Both of these changes make it easier to identify and group snapshot
files.
Name of the AVHD that is associated with snapshot - When you
open the settings for a virtual machine snapshot and look at the
hard disk settings – you will see the name of the AVHD that
is associated with that snapshot. This helps you to map AVHD
files to specific snapshots.
You can now edit AVHD files in the edit VHD wizard.
This means that if you want to manually merge AVHD files to a new
VHD to give to someone else – you can (note: be careful as
you can cause problems if you merge back into the parent in this
case).
You can now directly attach an AVHD file to a virtual
machine. This is very handy if you have lost your virtual
machine configuration and need to get data off of a snapshot file.
Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2009/06/18/changes-to-virtual-machine-snapshots-in-windows-server-2008-r2.aspx
|