Although system snapshots include all VMs and allow for restoring individual VMs, VM-level snapshots allow for customizing schedules and retention rules per individual virtual machine (for example, it may be desirable to capture more frequently or retain snapshots longer for certain VMs). Additionally, VM-level snapshots provide the option for a quiesced snapshot.

Typical (non-quiesced) snapshots are comparable to restoring a VM after an abrupt power loss or system crash. The filesystem may be mid-write and databases mid-transaction. Most modern operating systems can recover from this state automatically, but additional filesystem checks or database recovery steps may be required to return the system to a clean, consistent state.

Quiesced snapshots, by contrast, are taken after the operating system is briefly paused and given time to flush I/O, create database checkpoints, and write pending logs. The result is a snapshot captured from a clean, consistent point in time. This approach is significantly safer for critical workloads—especially databases—because restores start from a known-good state without requiring crash recovery.

By default, VM-level snapshots are not configured. VMs do not necessarily need a snapshot profile defined because system snapshots automatically include restorable snapshots for each VM.

However, you way wish to assign a snapshot profile to an individual VM in order to provide a different schedule. For example, it may be desireable to capture more frequent snapshots and/or retain snapshots longer for certain VM's (like database servers).

To configure a snapshot profile, see Create a New Snapshot Profile.





After the process is confirmed, tranferring the snapshot to your tenant can take up to a minute (depending on the size delta of the snapshot). Once transferred the snapshot will display as a Local snapshot and can be used for VM restores.





To avoid issues running both a restored clone and the source VM simultaneously, cloned VM drives can be mounted to a different VM to access restored data without powering on the clone.

You can now access this separate source VM and navigate the cloned VM's filesystem.