The question of using snapshots with SharePoint came up at a customer today. They aren’t really recommended because to get it right you’d have to be able to roll every machine – SharePoint and SQL databases – back to the same point in time. But I started to wonder if that was really true. I double checked, and the official guidance confirms:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff621103.aspx#snapshot
The only useful scenario would probably be a single server environment (ie a dev VM), or possibly a 1 SP 1 SQL environment. If you _do_ do snapshots, Microsoft recommends shutting down the VM first. Otherwise SharePoint timer jobs could be in the middle of doing something at 1PM and then “wake up” from a rollback suddenly at 4PM the next day. You’d be confused too.
