What Is Virtual Machine Snapshot (VM Snapshot)?

Snapshots are a great way to return to a virtual machine's initial state. Snapshots capture the state of the virtual machine, including all configuration settings. In other words, when you clone or duplicate one VM or set of VMs and then create snapshots for each one, you create a historical view of each server – now, what was it like with that particular configuration or at this time? You can also use snapshots for backup purposes by creating a snapshot before any significant changes are made on the VM. Then you can revert to that prior snapshot if something goes wrong during updates or patches. A virtual machine snapshot (VM snapshot) is a point-in-time copy of a VM that can be stored to revert to the snapshot state. Planned, manual and automatically triggered snapshots are the most common types, and the interval at which they are created varies based on your use case. Virtual machine snapshot, a VM snapshot or a VM image stores a copy of the entire virtual machine as it was at a given time. It also allows you to roll back to an earlier state if something has gone wrong or change multiple VMs quickly. The advantage over other OS-based snapshots is that they are lightweight and copies, which do not impact the performance of the running system and do not require any downtime to create them. Snapshots are also essential for an operational environment where the same VM instance must be completed multiple times. As you add more VMs to your infrastructure, you will likely need to take a snapshot before creating new VMs. While snapshots alone won't address all your disaster recovery needs, they can help ensure that VMs are in good working order so, you can quickly restore them from backups when needed.