VMWare Snapshots

Is it a good idea to take snapshots of production servers at regular intervals. I am reading a lot of website that suggest that you should not take snapshots of production systems, stating that it can effect network and machine performance. Anybody have any insight on this?

See: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1047809

Be aware that snapshots are not a replacement for backups! I use snapshots only for creating short-term failback points, e.g. before a server is patched with something that might break it. But I won't keep snapshots for longer than several days, and by no means I would create them on a regular basis, just because I can and might need them later.

Please note that most virtualization aware backup software also use snapshots in an automated way to bring a VM to a consistent read-only state before backing it up. But even then the snapshot is deleted again as soon as the backup job has finished.

Snapshots are not designed to make regular checkpoint and are not a backup solutions. You can have several issues by keeping them too much (like out of space, storage slow-down, and in some few cases also corruptions)