I'm fairly new to ESXI and I'm trying to grasp how snapshots work in this environment.
From what I understand so far, it seems like they work almost like GIT repositories, where a master snapshot is created first, and then a concurrent snapshot is dependent on the master snapshot and the concurrent snapshots (child snapshots) are dependent on each snapshot taken before it making kind of a chain of dependencies. It appears that when ESXI boots a VM, it actually uses the most recent snapshot along with the vdisk and not just the vdisk, meaning the most recent snapshot must be fully intact.
Here is my question. We like to take a snapshot of a certain VM once a week but over time we do not want it to fill up and over encumber our storage capacity. My first thought was to delete any snapshot older than 2 months, but upon doing this I was no longer able to boot into the VM. I did manage to repair it by loading the original vdisk image which was months out of date, and rebuilt everything from there, however; what is the best way to manage snapshots if you seemingly cannot delete the oldest snapshot without affecting the current snapshot?
Thanks.
