~ Dipti Goyal | SDET
Hello, I am Dipti Goyal, an engineer on the System Center Virtual Machine Manager team. System Center 2016 Virtual Machine Manager has the capability to create Production or Standard checkpoints and I summarize each of these processes below.
A little about Hyper-V Production Checkpoints
Production checkpoints allow you to easily create “point in time” images of a virtual machine which can be restored later on in a way that is completely supported for all production workloads. This is achieved by using backup technology inside the guest to create the checkpoint instead of using saved state technology. For production checkpoints, the Volume Snapshot Service (VSS) is used inside Windows virtual machines. Linux virtual machines flush their file system buffers to create a file system consistent checkpoint. If you want to create checkpoints using saved state technology you can still choose to use standard checkpoints for your virtual machine.
For any new virtual machines, the default is to create production checkpoints with a fallback to standard checkpoints.
More details on this can be found here.
What’s new in VMM Checkpoint options:
Hyper-V has added 4 types for checkpoints:
- Disabled
- Production
- ProductionOnly
- Standard
We have implemented these types in VMM, so let’s look at each of them in detail:
1. Disabled– This option disables the check-pointing ability on the VM. Once Checkpoint Type is set to this, a checkpoint cannot be taken on that VM until it’s set to some other value.
Example: Set-SCVirtualMachine –CheckpointType Disabled
This sets the CheckpointType property on the VM as ‘Disabled’
2. Production– Production checkpoints are application consistent snapshots of a virtual machine. Hyper-V leverages the guest VSS provider to create an image of the virtual machine where all of its applications are in a consistent state. The production snapshot does not involve the autorecovery phase during creation. Applying a production checkpoint requires the restored virtual machine to boot from an offline state just like with a restored backup. This is always more suitable for production environments.
Example: Set-SCVirtualMachine –CheckpointType Production
This sets the CheckpointType property on the VM as ‘Production’. With this option, if a Production checkpoint fails for any reason, a Standard checkpoint will be taken.
3. ProductionOnly– This option is same as Production, but if a Production checkpoint fails then no checkpoint will be taken.
Example: Set-SCVirtualMachine –CheckpointType ProductionOnly
This sets the CheckpointType property on the VM as ‘ProductionOnly’
4. Standard– In this kind of checkpoint, the memory states of running applications gets stored, then when you apply the checkpoint it’s back in the same state. For a production environment like a SQL server or Exchange Server this may not server the right purpose, thus this type of checkpoint is more suitable for dev-test environments.
Example: Set-SCVirtualMachine –CheckpointType Standard
This sets the CheckpointType property on the VM as ‘Standard’
The examples above are for Set-SCVirtualMachine, in VMM, however CheckpointType can also be set during the following operations:
- New-SCVirtualMachine –CheckpointType
- New-SCHardwareProfile –CheckpointType
- Set-SCHardwareProfile –CheckpointType
- New-SCVMTemplate –CheckpointType
- Set-SCVMTemplate –CheckpointType
If you want to change it from VMM UI, here are the options:
This gives VMM users the flexibility to change the checkpoints based on their requirements. Hope this is helpful and thanks for reading.
Dipti Goyal | SDET | Fabric Management
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