Good day,
As you know, when including guest memory in the snapshot, the entire contents of a VM's memory is written to disk. In your case, up to 16 GB of data has to be written to disk, which can take a bit of time, as you've experienced. Excluding memory should speed up the snapshot process considerably.
What would be the risk of taking snapshots of the running VM without the memory, if we were to ensure that any time a VM were reverted to a snapshot it was powered off?
There aren't necessarily risks associated with taking snapshots without guest memory. The important thing to note is that without dumping the guest's memory to disk during the snapshot, you won't be able to revert to a true, point-in-time snapshot. The entire contents of the VM's memory are foregone when you don't snapshot the memory along with the .vmdk. Without dumping memory to disk, you also can't revert to a VM power state other than, 'off.' I'm not sure whether it matters what the current power state of a VM is when reverting to a snapshot. My guess is it doesn't matter.
Would it be OK to delete the snapshot (taken without memory) without powering off the VM?
Yes. It is perfectly fine to delete a snapshot, taken with or without a memory dump, without powering off the VM.
Cheers,
Mike Brown
https://twitter.com/#!/VirtuallyMikeB
http://LinkedIn.com/in/michaelbbrown
Message was edited by: VirtuallyMikeB