Copy a VMware ESXi Snapshot into workstation?

[ranj]

Hi

 

We have recently changed our website and it was hosted on a Virtual machine in Vmware ESXi and before we moved over to the new website I did a snapshot through the infrastructure client console.

 

I have now realised that I need to get some information of the old website and am hoping that this is still held on the snapshot I took.

 

I have VM workstation installed on my local machine and wondered if its possible for me to take the snapshot files of the storage where the snapshot is located, copy it over to a temp location on my machine and open workstation and import the snapshot into the program. is this possible?

 

At the moment I cant copy the files onto my local hard drive and think this is because the vm is currently running.

 

Is there a solution for me to open the old snapshot VM's?

 

Thanks

[rob_f]

When you create a snapshot, it "forks" the VM and starts recording the differences to the pre-snapshot state as separate disk and memory delta files. The general use of snapshots is that you snapshot something to test to see if something works, but don't leave that snapshot active for any sustained period of time (either commit the change or rollback the snapshot). Otherwise, and certainly with transactional systems like databases, mailservers etc., you wouldn't be able to roll back the snapshot anyway as you'd lose all the data written to disk between the point you snapshot and now().

 

In your situation, you should be able to get what you need by leaving it in its snapshotted state for now, power off the VM, and only copy the .vmx, .nvram and .vmdks over, not taking the snapshot files. Then turn it back on. Once you are certain that you have the old stuff you need, I'd seriously consider committing the snapshot to flatten it to one vmdk on ESXi.

 

When you have it on Workstation you should just be able to add the .vmx into your local inventory, but if not - create a new VM exactly the same and instead of creating a disk for it, point it at the .vmdk from your ESXi. I believe that Workstation and ESXi in their latest versions have the same format vmdks.

 

Hope this both helps and makes sense, almost time to put my bed to brain

 

Rob.

Edited March 5, 2009 by rob_f