Deleting a virtual machine snapshot

As previously discussed, snapshots are for temporary use only and would need to be removed subsequently. Deleting a snapshot is often misconceived as deleting data in the snapshot, however it is actually the process of committing (writing) the disk data into the immediate parent disk. This also implies the memory state (if taken) from the snapshot files are restored as well. The user can do this for every single snapshot or cumulatively for all the snapshots that exist.

Getting ready

You will need to log in to the vSphere Web Client with the appropriate privileges to manage snapshots. All tasks are to be done through the virtual machines' snapshot manager. Manual modification of files requires significant expertise or may lead to data loss.

How to do it...

A delete operation can be performed in the following two methods:

• Delete Snapshot: This operation will allow for a specific snapshot to be deleted. When this is done, the data held by its VMSN and the delta...