Confused regarding crash-consistent snapshot and application-consistent snapshot?

Crash-Consistent Snapshot

VM snapshots are by default crash-consistent, which means that the vDisks captured are consistent with a single point in time. The snapshot represents the on-disk data as if the VM crashed or the power cord was pulled from the server—it doesn’t include anything that was in memory when the snapshot was taken. Today, most applications can recover well from crash-consistent snapshots.

Application-Consistent Snapshot

Application-consistent snapshots capture the same data as crash-consistent snapshots, with the addition of all data in memory and all transactions in process. Because of their extra content, application-consistent snapshots are the most involved and take the longest to perform.

While most organizations find crash-consistent snapshots to be sufficient, Nutanix also supports application-consistent snapshots. The Nutanix application-consistent snapshot uses Nutanix Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to quiesce the file system for ESXi and AHV prior to taking the snapshot. You can configure which type of snapshot each protection domain should maintain.


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Data Protection and Recovery