Checking ESX/VC VMs for snapshots

This post provides several methods of determining whether any VMs in a Virtual Center 2 environment have any active snapshots. This is a useful monitoring task in production environments, as taking a snapshot and forgetting to remove the snapshot can cause problems when consolidating in the future. Included is a SQL query, a sqlcmd query, and a simple 'ls' command to run from the service console.


Method 1 - Run a query through SQL Management Studio against the Virtual Center database

select ENT.Name as 'Name', DNS_Name as 'DNS Name', Guest_OS as 'OS', Mem_Size_MB as 'Mem', IP_Address as 'IP', VM.FILE_Name as 'VMX location', VM.Suspend_Time as 'Suspend Time', VM.Suspend_Interval as 'Suspend Interval', VMS.Snapshot_Name as 'Snapshot Name', VMS.Snapshot_Desc 'Snapshot Description', DateAdd("Hour", 10, VMS.Create_Time) as 'Snapshot Time', VMS.Is_Current_Snapshot 'Current Snapshot' from vpx_vm VM
inner join VPX_GUEST_NET_ADAPTER NET on VM.ID = NET.VM_ID
inner join VPX_ENTITY ENT on VM.ID = ENT.ID
inner join VPX_SNAPSHOT VMS on VM.ID = VMS.VM_ID

Method 2 - Query the Virtual Center database for Virtual Machine snapshots (GMT+10) using sqlcmd

sqlcmd -S %server% -d %database% -W -s "," -Q "select ENT.Name as 'Name', DNS_Name as 'DNS Name', Guest_OS as 'OS', Mem_Size_MB as 'Mem', IP_Address as 'IP', VM.FILE_Name as 'VMX location', VM.Suspend_Time as 'Suspend Time', VM.Suspend_Interval as 'Suspend Interval', VMS.Snapshot_Name as 'Snapshot Name', VMS.Snapshot_Desc 'Snapshot
Description', DateAdd(Hour, 10, VMS.Create_Time) as 'Snapshot Time', VMS.Is_Current_Snapshot 'Current Snapshot' from vpx_vm VM inner join VPX_GUEST_NET_ADAPTER NET on VM.ID = NET.VM_ID inner join VPX_ENTITY ENT on VM.ID = ENT.ID inner join VPX_SNAPSHOT VMS on VM.ID = VMS.VM_ID"

Example output:
VM1,VM1.domain.com,winXPProGuest,768,192.168.0.1,sanfs://vmfs_uuid:47445a61-08269406-d462-0419b6f67087/VM1/VM1.vmx,NULL,0,Test Snapshot,,2008-03-29 07:24:31.170,1

Method 3 - View vmsn files from the service console

ls -Ral /vmfs/volumes/*.* grep .vmsn

Note that VMware would not recommend querying SQL directly, and I suspect would instead suggest using their very (in my opinion) unintuitive SDK and object model. Bring on the PowerShell management interface.

Wayne's World of IT (WWoIT), Copyright 2008 Wayne Martin.