How reliable are VMWare snapshots?

[cleverhandle]

I've been playing around with VMWare Server's snapshot functionality a bit. Seems pretty neat and quite smooth, but it also seems like the sort of thing that could fail in spectacular fashion. What's people's experience with snaps been here? I'm trying to decide how much trouble I want to go through to backup "baseline" VM's.

 

[ProviaFan]

I've used an older version of VMWare Workstation, and now VMWare Server, totaling a few years of VMWare product usage. Snapshots have never failed on me, though I haven't used them excessively (mainly to back up a post-installation state of each VM, as it seems you want to do). My only experience has been with VMWare on a Windows host with various Linux distros, Solaris, and Windows as guests.

 

[Nothinman]

I can only recall one issue with them, I don't remember how I did it but I got it into a state where it wouldn't restore the snapshot and I had to just ditch it and boot the image clean. But that was with VMWare Workstation, not Server. And I think it was in the 5.0 line back when they first introduced the multiple snapshots stuff, so it might not be a problem anymore.

 

[Brazen]

I've used it pretty extensively. I reverted to a snapshot on an application server mysteriously stopped working. It looked like one of those situations where I was going to be working on it all day and then some to figure out what was wrong, but instead I just reverted to a snapshot and all was well, and this snapshot was taken like 3 months ago.

I've also used it for testing, where I'm constantly breaking or trying new things and then reverting back to a clean snapshot. Never had problems with that either.