A single checkpoint does not usually make a huge difference in virtual machine performance, but the accumulation of checkpoints can have a very noticeable effect on performance. The creation of a virtual machine checkpoint negatively impacts virtual machine read performance as a result of the heretical relationship between the parent virtual hard disk and the differencing disk. When you create a Hyper-V checkpoint, you are actually creating a differencing disk. However, we need to think about what is going to happen to the checkpoints in the future. It would be really easy to use the Get-VM cmdlet to retrieve a list of the virtual machines that reside on a Hyper-V host, and then use the Checkpoint-VM cmdlet to create checkpoints for all of those virtual machines. The PowerShell cmdlet for creating a checkpoint is Checkpoint-VM. With that said, let's go ahead and look at how create checkpoints in bulk. Microsoft is introducing a production checkpoint feature in Windows Server 2016 that will allow for safe checkpointing of virtualized application servers, because the checkpoint feature will leverage the Volume Shadow Copy services. But what if you have a large number of virtual machines that need to be updated, and you want to create checkpoints on all of them? Well, in this type of situation, PowerShell can make quick work of an otherwise impractical task.īefore I show you how to use PowerShell to checkpoint large numbers of virtual machines, I need to point out that Microsoft does not currently recommend the use of checkpoints on production virtual machines, because checkpoints are not application aware.

This technique works well if you only need to update a few virtual machines. That way, if something were to go wrong with an update, then the virtual machine can easily be reverted back to its previous state. For example, some people like to create virtual machine checkpoints prior to installing updates. Although Hyper-V checkpoints are not a substitute for backups, they do have their place.

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