SoftGrid: Taking a snapshot of your virtual machine during the sequencing process

A question we get every now and then concerns taking a snapshot of a virtual machine while you're in the middle of monitoring a sequencing process.  Sometimes you might want to do this if the sequencing of your application is long and drawn out, you're sequencing multiple apps together, or if you're wanting to create a couple different sequences starting from the same initial config.  While I can definitely understand the reasons for wanting to do this, generally speaking we (Microsoft) don't support doing this because it's not something that we've fully tested and because we seen some problems when this was done before.  There's essentially no guarantee that what's in memory prior to termination will be captured upon restart so if your sequence requires multiple installations, or if you find that you need to stop for some reason, we recommend that you "Stop Monitoring" between installations and leave the sequencer open and continue the next day or whenever.

This falls in line with the rest of our sequencing best practices but it's not something I've seen documented so I wanted to be sure it got mentioned here.  If you want to learn more about the rest of our sequencing best practices take a look at our MCS Sequencing Guidelines doc at https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=1C6A73B8-5DA8-4A1A-838B-A41CA492C488&displaylang=en.

Robert Morris | Manageability Support Engineer

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  PingBack from http://engineer.bobtheblog.info/?p=9993

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  The first thing you’ll probably want to do in preparation for your callback is gather up any relevant

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  The comment has been removed