A little knowledge about Snapshot in Hyper-V

1. each time you create a snapshot, a file with the suffix avhd is created. after snapshot is deleted, the avhd will not disappear immediately. after the VM is shut down, hyper-v will start to automatically merge avhd to the original vhd or another avhd, depending on the snapshot creation structure.

That is to say, if you want to integrate all avhd files into a vhd file, and you no longer need these snapshots, you just need to delete all the snapshots and turn off the virtual machine, wait until merge finishes.

 

2. snapshot can have branches during production, and merge occurs when the branches are deleted. In this case, some complicated deletion scenarios are involved, and the results are not very definite. the article "Brian Ehlert" in the reference material is very good. this topic is very informative. Please note it here for future reference.

 

 

 

3. avhd can be integrated with vhd files (merge. for detailed steps, see the document Recovering Your Virtual Machine. how to Manually Merge Hyper-V Snapshots Back into one VHD. the core step is to use the Edit Disk wizard for merge. when there are multiple avhd files, merge needs to perform merge (original In reverse for each AVHD file created (latest to oldest) In reverse order of creation time )). you can sort by last modified in windows explorer, so that you know the time sequence of snapshot capture. if there are many branchs, you can use the config file to determine the snapshot structure. For details, see references.

 

References

Managing Hyper-V snapshots-the basics

Http://itproctology.blogspot.com/2008/07/managing-hyper-v-snapshots-basics.html

Recovering Your Virtual Machine. How to Manually Merge Hyper-V Snapshots Back into one VHD

Http://www.networkfoo.org/server-infrastructure/recovering-your-virtual-machine-how-manually-merge-hyper-v-snapshots-back-one-