Isolating a virtual machine hard disk from snapshots in vCenter Server 5.x and 6.0

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

This article provides steps to disable snapshot creation from a single or multiple disks of a virtual machine by setting the mode to Persistent

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5
VMware vCenter Server 5.1.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0
VMware vCenter Server 5.5.x
VMware vCenter Server 6.0.x
VMware vCenter Server 5.0.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0

Resolution

To set a virtual machine disk to Persistent mode:

1. From the vSphere Client, power off the virtual machine.
2. Delete any snapshots that currently exist. For more information, see the Deleting Snapshots section of the vSphere Virtual Machine Administration guide.
3. Right-click the virtual machine and click Edit settings.
4. Click the Hardware tab and select the hard disk to exclude.
5. Under Mode select Independent.
6. Select an independent mode option. For more information on disk persistence modes, see the Change Disk Mode to Exclude Virtual Disks from Snapshots section in the vSphere Client of the vSphere Administration with the vSphere Client guide.
7. Click OK.

Note: Taking a snapshot of the virtual machine and viewing the snapshot files in the Datastore Browser will show snapshot files for all the disks not set to Independent Persistent Mode, these will have virtual_machine-000001.vmdk files. Disks set to Independent Persistent Mode will not have these files.

Additional Information

vCenter Server 5.x および 6.0 でのスナップショットからの仮想マシン ハードディスクの分離