VMware snapshots are important part of vSphere infrastructure. Using snapshots is very flexible way of being able to go back in time and revert changes. VMware snapshots are used by admins, developers and other IT team members who are not all VMware specialists. As such it might be a good idea to learn some good practices about snapshots and this technology, to get the most out of it.

Typically, snapshots are used to return a virtual machine to its previous state in case of any errors during updates or configuration changes. Thus, they will save your system from unpredictable failures. But please, do not consider a snapshot as a backup and vice versa!

Let’s be honest, snapshots are not backups. Each snapshot is associated with a certain set of indices (or a single index) to refer other blocks on the disk. If the corresponding storage goes down, you’ll lose all your data because you’ll be unable to restore everything from a snapshot. Based on this, be smart and do not rely on them and use the proper set of tools for backups. In other words, use a hammer for nails and screwdriver for screws.

Snapshots in VMware vSphere often cause various problems with configurations and performance, unless they are properly used – for live backup of virtual machines and temporary keeping VM configuration before the update.

However, using them in large infrastructures is unavoidable. At some point you may need to delete/consolidate virtual machine snapshots (Delete All button in Snapshot Manager), which is quite time-consuming and demanding in terms of storage performance. Thus it would be a good thing to know in advance how much time it takes.

MSI package are useful to be deployed in centralized management environment of Microsoft Active Directory. Unfortunately to deploy a software you need a MSI package. Microsoft do not support deploying EXE applications via GPOs.

So if your organization has some of those EXE applications and want do manage the deployment via Group policy, it’s necessary to repackage the EXE and create an MSI package.