VMware的Snapshot（快照）相关知识

最近在研究VMware的快照的相关知识，在这里做个记录和分享。

先简单介绍下快照。

A snapshot preserves the state and data of a virtual machine at a special point in time.

1) 快照保存了虚拟机在特定时间点的power state；

2) 还有就是数据。比如内存信息，所以当你做了个memory snapshot的时候，那个快照文件.vmsn的大小和你分配给虚拟机的内存大小几乎一样。

当你做了快照之后，VMware就创建一个child disk(sparse disk)，之后虚拟机的数据变更都会写在这个child disk中，而base disk就变成只读的了。

base disk 和那个快照文件.vmsn就可以还原快照时的状态。

下面是一个老外写的关于快照配置文件的一些内容。

VMware records snapshot information about the current VM in a .vmsd file. This file is located with the rest of the virtual machine configuration and VMDK files on the datastore. The file is normally called .vmsd. This file will contain information, even if your VM has no snapshots in place.

It is possible that in some cases, ESX fails to properly clean up after previous snapshots were removed. The information for p