Managing snapshots in vSphere environments is a task that folks have dealt with for years. I remember one of my first PowerCLI scripts was one that sent email notifications for snapshots over a week old to review and manually clean them up. In this post we’ll walk through one way of automating this cleanup using VCF Operations Automation Central.
In VCF Operations this is under Infrastructure Operations > Automation Central (or Operations > Automation Central, depending on version) we can create an automated job. There are several tiles available for automated jobs, but for this example we’ll use a ‘reclaim’ job:
For step 1 of our reclaim job, we’ll enter a job name & select ‘Delete old snapshots.’ We have an opportunity to add a description and specify various snapshot details, like only deleting snapshots older than 7 days, filtering by size or matching a specific snapshot name.
For step 2, we’ll define a scope, selecting specific objects that contain the VMs we want this automation to target. In the screenshot below, we’ve picked all of one vCenter, another Datacenter, and a specific cluster from a 3rd vCenter. This allows us to create different job scopes for different types of environments.
In step 3, we can define additional filter criteria. This is incredibly flexible. In the example below I’ve specified 3 different criteria combined with ‘and’ logic.
- Tag ‘SnapshotPolicy’ not exists = means that there is no tag assigned to this VM with the category SnapshotPolicy. This would allow me to assign this tag category to some VMs with tags like ‘1 month’ or ‘manual’ and have separate jobs for them. This ‘not exists’ job would get all other VMs.
- Metrics CPU|Usage (%) is less than 50% = would allow me to exclude VMs that are busy doing something.
- Properties Configuration|Number of VMDKs is less than 5 = excludes VMs that have a lot of VMDKs.
We can add additional criteria on other metrics, properties, tags, object names, etc as needed.
On the final step 4 we can schedule how often this task runs. In my example this job is only running on Saturdays for the next year, and it will send a email updates as needed.
Conclusion
VCF Operations Automation Central is a very powerful tool and can be used to automate routine tasks such as snapshot removal. If you’re not yet using Automation Central, i’s worth exploring to streamline operations and reduce manual effort.