How to disregard checkpoints in Hyper-V?

Question

I start using Microsoft Hyper-V for testing before deployment to end-users and/or trouble-shooting. For this purpose, I have a rather fresh OS image of my employer, let's call the checkpoint root. If I mess this one up, I cannot easily recover it.

Now, for a complex test, I prepare the VM with pre-requisites and create a checkpoint test-start. I can revert to this, whenever I need to start a new run. So far everything is perfect.

The question: How can I simply disregard this test-start checkpoint without merging it into my root, once I finished the testing? If test-start would have child checkpoints, I would like to disregard them as well. In summary, I'd like to do delete checkpoint subtree, but without the merging that implicitly happens if doing so.

I have been searching quite a bit on the web, of course reading the MS docs as well, but couldn't find that kind of information. I hope this question is not too stup... ehm, trivial .. yet simple to answer for somebody.

Answer 1

I believe by deleting the test-start checkpoint and discarding the changes you mean to restore the virtual machine to its original state, i.e. the root checkpoint. That's exactly what's needed to be done. Revert the virtual machine to the root checkpoint and delete the test-start subtree. By reverting to root checkpoint, the test-start and its subtree will belong to a point in time after the current running state, so the corresponding AVHDX files will be deleted immediately without merging.

Answer 2

I found some other MS documentation. It seems so simple that deleting a checkpoint in another branch or ahead in time of the currently running VM, the merging is not happening, and "deleting" the checkpoint actually is a pure "delete" operation.