Shutting down the VM during the export will give you a fully consistent state of the VM whereas snapshots without further help from the VM itself will only provide "crash consistency", that is provide you with a disk image equivalent to one where the power cord was plugged out of the running machine, which is usually, but not always consistent enough :) BTW: As far as I understand the OVA export run from the engines web-gui *is* also doing a snapshot. You can see the snapshot if you have a look at the VM's disks while the export is running. --              juergen