VM Snapshots and SharePoint 2010

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.