We were busy finalizing a Linux appliance when we noticed something odd.
We had several copies of the same appliance and one needed 15 seconds to boot - while another copy needed 39 seconds.
Only difference: the fast booting VM had a single snapshot while the other had none.
This results contradicted all our expectations so we repeated the tests with other VMs.
And quite unexpected we had the same results with other VMs.
A Windows 2008 R2 VM for example boots about 7 seconds faster if the VM has a snapshot.
During our tests we used the same storage and ESXi hosts that were not too busy ....
Can anybody explain this unexpected behaviour ?