Home > Storage > PowerVault > Guides > Dell PowerVault ME5 Series: Microsoft Hyper-V Best Practices > Hyper-V Checkpoints
A native Hyper-V-based checkpoint creates a snapshot of a VM on the physical host volume or cluster volume.
Note: Native Hyper-V checkpoints (snapshots) are not the same as ME5 storage snapshots. ME5 array-based snapshots and native Hyper-V snapshots function independently.
Each additional Hyper-V checkpoint creates an additional new snapshot. They are stored in a hierarchical tree.
Hyper-V snapshots are mentioned here because of their impact on storage read performance. A long chain of Hyper-V checkpoints can degrade read performance. During a read operation, the requested blocks may reside in different checkpoints which can increase read latency enough to impact performance.
The recommendation is to avoid using Hyper-V checkpoints, or to use them sparingly or temporarily.
Administrators can leverage ME5 array-based snapshots to protect and replicate VM data, in addition to using native Hyper-V VM replication tools.