ESX Snapshots on Modified “Hardware”

In using VMware ESX (3.0) in our QA/DEV environment we have the opportunity to put it to the test quite often. One of the features of ESX that we rely on heavily is the snapshot features, particularly when setting up new test environments. One pitfall that we discovered is that if certain hardware changes are made to the VM, such as swapping virtual hard drives you will be unable to create or revert snapshots. The best solution that we found on VMware’s web site was to re-clone the machine to a new machine and then delete the old machine.