After consulting with two VMware experts, I stand by my original statement, that a snapshot of a vm is a crash consistent copy, which means that it's just like someone pulled the power plug. It is NOT like someone suspending a VM.
There are 3rd party products that provide additional levels of consistency (netapp, falconstor that I know of), but the default VMware snapshots are crash consistent, not transactional consistent. --- W. Curtis Preston Backup Blog @ www.backupcentral.com VP Data Protection, GlassHouse Technologies > -----Original Message----- > From: Steven Kurylo [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2008 2:06 PM > To: Curtis Preston; [email protected] > Subject: Re: Backing up VMware-VMs > > Curtis Preston wrote: > > Unless you're coordinating with the OS, then taking a VMware snapshot > > and copying it is equivalent to pulling the power plug on a server. > > Will it power back up without corruption? 99.9% of the time, yes. Has > > anyone who has been in the biz for a while had a scenario where > > powercycling a box caused a corrupted OS disk? I'd say so. > > > Thats false. > > Its the same thing as suspending a VM. When you restore the you can > either restore it as if the power was shut off or resume it as if > nothing had happened. Obviously the outside world has changed, so > network connections, the time, etc, will have changed.
