Evaluating VMWare workstation 5.5 beta. Loaded up Fedora Core 4, made a snapshot, did an rm -rf /etc, restored no problem. Previously, I had even rm -rf / and it had the same success (which makes sense). Really fun to play with.

Here is a video showing the process.

vmware-snapshots.swf [2.3M]

First, we do some proof that the box is working normally and we take a snapshot. Some GUI weirdness because I clicked too much and then we remove the entire /etc directory. The file /etc/passwd is gone so `id -a root` fails. Weird that the `su` doesn’t fail. The sytem continues to run although we’ve severely messed it up. On a normal box, we’d restore from tape or another machine maybe.

We log out and we can’t log back in. Doh. What’s really funny is that the error message goes into caps when I try to log in as ‘AAAAAAAHHHHHHH’. The machine is yelling back maybe?

Click on snapshot manager, selected the snapshot, it took about 7-10 seconds for it to catch up (I think it’s just reading the deltas from within the virtual hard-drive image). The window state, filesystem state, memory, cpu … the whole machine state is restored. It’s amazing. Like an emulator state. Of course there is some work going on in the background.

Recording the movie on the same machine had some overhead, count that in when you are judging speed.

The files are there, nothing was lost.