Can I take a snapshot of an environment?
To create a backup and restore point for a VM or environment, save the environment as a template. When you save an environment as a template, you can choose to save the entire environment or specific VMs and networks in the environment.
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How to use templates as snapshots
Although templates have many more capabilities than VMware snapshots, you can still use templates to get snapshot-like behavior in Skytap.
To create a snapshot of the VMs in an environment
- Start with an environment in a known good state.
- Save it as a template.
To restore a single VM in an environment
- Delete the VM you want to replace.
- Add just that VM from the template.
What are templates?
Unlike VMware snapshots, which create a differential rollback state for a single VM, templates preserve a complete copy of the environment settings, VMs, and networks in a read-only state.
Rather than rollback an environment to this saved point, you deploy a new environment from the template. Each environment created from the template is an exact, working copy of the template. This allows you to quickly and easily create an entire environment in a known, good state. For instructions, see Creating an environment from a template.
To restore a single VM from the template, you can add the VM to an existing environment. This creates a new, working copy of the VM. For instructions, see How to use templates as snapshots below.
For more information about the settings that are saved with a template, see Settings saved with a template.
Notes
- You can save a single environment as a template multiple times.
- You can create a template with the same name as an existing template; the two templates exist side by side. Generally, you should give your templates unique names to help differentiate between them.
- Later changes to the environment don't affect the template.