Copying a VM to another region for Disaster Recovery.

Making a copy of a VM for troubleshooting or forensic investigation.

Backing up a VM before making a major change.

Restoring a VM to an earlier version by creating a new VM from the snapshot and deleting the existing VM.

So given these points, what uses are there for managed disk snapshots:

Snapshots are not generalised and so can’t be used as a generic image.

This does mean you can use a snapshot to create multiple VMs

You need to create a managed disk from a snapshot before it can be used with a VM.

In this scenario you are best turning off the machine before snapshotting it. If you are using multiple disks in a RAID array or Storage Pool there is no guarantee that the snapshot will occur at exactly the same time on each disk and so can cause inconsistencies.

Snapshots are not consistent across disks.

Snapshots are **not **incremental, each time you take a snapshot you are creating a full new copy of the managed disk and are charged appropriately.

For example if you have a 128GB managed disk but are only usign 50GB, you will be charged for the full 128GB for the disk, but only 50GB for the snapshot

You are charged for the storage of each snapshot, however snapshots only use as much storage as your VM disks are using, not the size of the managed disk.

You can achieve this with managed disk snapshots, but it takes more work. They are not like snapshots taken in something like VMWare Workstation, which can be used to easily restore a VM to a previous state.

Azure Managed Disk snapshots are use to create a point in time copy of an existing disk that can then be used to create a new VM.

In this article we’ll explore what benefits snapshots give you, and how to use them.īefore we delve into how to use snapshots, there are some key points to be aware of when using them: One of these features that is often overlooked or misunderstood is snapshots. Managed disks brought a number of benefits to Azure VM’s over thee previous method of manually managing storage accounts used for VM disks.

Azure vm snapshot