With the release of vCloud Director 5.1, it is now possible to take advantage of snapshots.  This highly requested feature allows you to capture the state of a VM or vApp at a particular point of time.  At a later time, you can then revert back to the snapshot.

This is great for environments where you are performing destructive testing or are experimenting with something as you can quickly return to a baseline.

The snapshot functionality works for both virtual machines and vApps.  In the case of vApps, a snapshot request will create snapshots for all of the virtual machines within that vApp.  It works with both powered on and powered off VMs.  You also have the ability to snapshot the disk and the memory contents as well.

Currently, it does not support multiple snapshots however.  This means that if you have a existing snapshot and then take another, the previous snapshot will be overwritten.  Users of Workstation where one can have a tree of snapshots may find this somewhat limiting, but it can only get better in the future.  Snapshots also do not save the network config.  You’ll notice that after you take a snapshot, the ability for you to change the networking settings is disabled.  The reason for this to avoid any issues where one tries to revert a snapshot back after changes to the network have taken place, thereby causing things not to work.

For a demonstration of the snapshot feature in vCloud Director 5.1, the following short video will show you how easy it is to use.