Hello Woody,
Care to share the steps you take to accomplish this?It is all handwork, so use it at your own risk! Don't try this at home, but only at your collegues machines, or test your procedure very carefully at a test vm. Google and search for any other warning that might be applicable for dangerous actions or other stupid things and read them very carefully. If you are sure what you are doing and don't mind to lose potentially important stuff, then read on.....
In the machine.vmx file I created the entry:
snapshot.action = "prompt"
When shutting down a VM, it will provide you with a promp what to do:
This added to the fact that you can handle a single snapshot from the fusion interface provides you with a way to create multiple snapshots for a Fusion VM.
If a snapshot is made, both the vmx and the vmsd files are being changed. In the vmx file the diskfile entry gets a new reference to the last delta file. In the vmsd file you will find infromation pointing to the previous or parent diskfile and to a snapshot file SnapshotX.vmsn with other information necessary for mainting your vm's state.
If you create a Fusion interface snapshot, the vmsd snapshot entry gets a displayName = "VMware Fusion snapshot" This line will enable the Fusion interface to handle the last(!) snapshot. This means both reverting to and discarding snapshots.
If you want to create more than one snapshot from a running vm, you'll have to change the displayName to something else, so Fusion thinks it has no snapshot. This will enable you to create another powered on snapshot.
If a snapshot is being made, it checks the snapshot.lastUID value, this will be incremented and being used to identify the current snapshot. This number can be found in the snapshotx.uid as well as the vmsn filename. For creating multiple snapshot I mostly use the power off generated snapshot. After a snapshot is made, I change the snapshot description in the vmsd file for tracing back what it was.
If I want to go back to a particular snapshot, you can edit both the vmx file as well as the vmsd file to use the desired set of files. If you want to be able to revert back to (or discard ) a automatic generated snapshot you'll have to change the displayName = line from your last snapshot entry. You can even change more than one of your snapshot entries so you can discard more than one snapshot in succession from within the fusion interface.It's all a little bit klunky, and you also have to work very carefully, but for creating test and demo environments it's 'workable'. At least I'm not forced to power up my old dell laptop with vmware workstation, but i can just tracel with my mac book pro...
All we have to do is wait until the vmware fusion guys are building a little interface for handling the snapshot more elegant. As I have said a dozen time before. VMWare has the technology, it's even in the product, they are just completly ignoring all the tech people who are begging for this functionality.....
regards -frank-
