Types of Checkpoints

  • Standard Checkpoints (formerly known as Hyper-V snapshots) take a snapshot of the VM and its memory state, which allows you to capture the VM state at a particular point in time. A standard snapshot doesn’t enable application consistency, which may result in incomplete data transactions. This is crucial for VMs running Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, or any other application/database which transfers data between different nodes. Also, note that this snapshot type shouldn’t be regarded as a full backup.
  • Production Checkpoints can create a data-consistent backup with the help of Volume Shadow Copy Service (for VMs running on Windows) or File System Freeze (for VMs running on Linux). Thus, production checkpoints are created in accordance with the backup technology inside the guest OS. When creating a production checkpoint, no snapshot of the VM memory state is taken. Note that production checkpoints are enabled by default. However, if you want to change the checkpoint type, you can use either Hyper-V Manager or PowerShell. [Source]

Getting all Checkpoints of a VM

Get-VMSnapshot -VMName <vmname>

Creating Checkpoints with Powershell

The following commands can be run to change the checkpoint with PowerShell.

Set to Standard Checkpoint:

Set-VM -Name <vmname> -CheckpointType Standard

Set to Production Checkpoint, if the production checkpoint fails a standard checkpoint is being created:

Set-VM -Name <vmname> -CheckpointType Production

Set to Production Checkpoint, if the production checkpoint fails a standard checkpoint is not being created.

Set-VM -Name <vmname> -CheckpointType ProductionOnly

Joining Hyper-V Snapshots (Remove-VMSnapshot)

Get-VMSnapshot -VMName <vmname> | Remove-VMSnapshot

Links: