Monday, January 10, 2011

What to do if Take snapshot option is disabled in VMWare

We often use virtual environments for Sharepoint development (VMWare and VirtualPC are most frequently used virtualization platforms in our case). I also often use snapshot feature of VMWare if some risky configuration changes are required. It is really useful when you can rollback system changes to the last stable snapshot in a few minutes comparing with spending hours on restoring failed system from scratch.

Recently I encountered with strange situation: “Take Snapshot…” option in menu was disabled (grayed):

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After some investigation I found that hard disk drives were configured in Independent persistent mode (VM > Settings > Hard disk > Advanced):

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As documentation says:

Independent – For independent disks, the data on the disk is not recorded when you take a snapshot of the virtual machine. If the Independent check box is unavailable, it might mean that the virtual machine currently has snapshots. After you delete the snapshots, the check box becomes available.

I had several HDD – all with independent mode. So I uncheck “Independent” checkbox for all drives, and after that “Take Snapshot…” option became available:

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It is important to note that you should uncheck “Independent” checkbox for all disks, because if there will be at least one disk in independent mode snapshots will be still disabled. Hope it will economy your time if you will face with similar problem.

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