Snapshot technology is available with the Storage Foundation (SFW) FlashSnap option. Running in the guest, snapshot copies of data volumes can be created, allowing for quickly recovering from a disaster, or for off-host operations, which can occur to another virtual machine (VM) or to a physical server connected to storage that is shared with the guest when it uses pass-through disks. SFW also supports Microsoft's VSS framework for creating consistent snapshots.

However, this offers no protection against possible disaster that can occur at the VM level. If the VHD file that holds a VM is corrupted, the volume that hosts the VHD file(s) is lost, or the LUN hosting the volume that are used by the VHD file fails, snapshots in the guest are useless until the VM can be rebuilt and the application(s) reinstalled.

By running SFW in the parent partition, you have the advantage of being able to create snapshots of the volumes containing the VHDs. These snapshots can be used to quickly recover the entire VM in the event of a disaster. They can also be moved to another server and brought online to be backed up or used for other operations such as testing.