New free tool, HyperSnapshot now available

Last week I wrote about the construction, and the challenges, of the creation of a guest virtual machine -based snapshot management solution (or “tool”) for Hyper-V environments. As promised, it’s now available for downloading.

As with our other free tools, the download(s) for HyperSnapshot can be found from here, our community tools page. While both the host -based and guest -based components are really small in size, we decided to have a separate ZIP file for each.

For the Hyper-V host machine(s) you will need to have HyperSnapshot’s host -package, which has one [service] executable (HyperSnapshotService.exe) and installation + removal scripts. Once installed, the service will run in the background responding automatically to the requests made from the virtual machine (guest systems), with zero configuration necessary. The service is engineered so that it try and use as little of resources possible on the host system, which in effect means no continuous polling of VMs but rather responding to changes as indicated by WMI eventing system.

For all the virtual machines you wish to have guest-based snapshot functionality enabled, guest -package needs to be downloaded and extracted to. Since we do not have an installer  – at least at this point in time – the client executable (HyperSnapshotGui.exe) has to be started manually by the user or shortcut created for it. Please note that like written in the previous article, the client executable needs elevation in order to function properly. As with the host-side component running on the Hyper-V host machine, the client component does not need any explicit configuration.

Only requirements the tool has are:

• Hyper-V Integration Components (IC) are installed to the guest VM
• Data Exchange service is enabled for the VM (it is by default).

I hope that you find the tool useful, especially in context of App-V packaging!