A manual, immediate snapshot of an individual VM is created from the VM dashboard in Prism Element. The administrator opens the VM table, selects the target VM and invokes the Take Snapshot action. Prism then creates a point-in-time snapshot containing the VM configuration and the supported virtual-disk state.
This procedure is appropriate when the requirement concerns one VM and the snapshot must be taken immediately. Prism Central Data Protection is used for broader protection policies, recovery points, protection schedules and multi-cluster disaster-recovery operations. Those capabilities are valuable for recurring or policy-based protection but are not the direct manual workflow described in the question.
Connecting to a Controller VM is unnecessary and would bypass the supported administrative interface. The Prism Central Images service manages deployable disk images, ISO files and VM image resources; an image is not a point-in-time snapshot of a running VM.
For application-consistent protection, additional guest-side preparation such as Nutanix Guest Tools may be required. A standard manual snapshot, however, is initiated through the selected VM’s Prism Element actions.
NHCF/NCA reference: VM Management—VM dashboard, VM lifecycle tasks, snapshots and recovery points; NCA Section 2, “Describe VM tasks.” Official references: Prism 7.5—Creating a VM Snapshot Manually , Prism 7.5—Managing an AHV VM .
===============
