Use cases and best practices while using snapshots

We mentioned that there's a big love-hate relationship in the IT world with regard to snapshots. Let's discuss the reasons and some common-sense best practices when using snapshots, as follows:

• When you take a VM snapshot, you are creating new delta copy of the VM disk, qemu2, or a raw file, and then you are writing to that delta. So, the more data you write, the longer it's going to take to commit and consolidate it back into the parent. Yes—you will eventually need to commit snapshots, but it is not recommended you go into production with a snapshot attached to the VM.
• Snapshots are not backups; they are just a picture of a state, taken at a specific point in time, to which you can revert when required. Therefore, do not rely on it as a direct backup process. For that, you should implement a backup infrastructure and strategy.
• Don't keep a VM with a snapshot associated with it for long time...