VMware: Locate VMs snapshots using PowerCLI

Here's another PowerCLI post.
Everyone who is dealing with vSphere knows about snapshots pros and cons. To be honest I've had in the past some issues with snapshots, typically when visiting customers datacenters I found out VMs that were running on snapshots so old that they were bigger in size than base vmdk itself or, as once happened, that a backup software created almost 200 snapshots of a VM because, once backup was performed successfully, it was not able to revert back the snapshot.

That's why a common suggestion is to use snapshots just for updating purpouses like OS patching and revert them as soon as possible because as they grow up in size it could be unconfortable to revert them back.

After this introduction here's the main topic of this post: a PowerCLI script that locates snapshots of your VMs.

Save this code as a file with .ps1 extension:

 foreach($vm in ($VMs = Get-VM)){  
 $vm | Get-HardDisk | %{  
   if($_.Filename -like "*-??????.vmdk" -and ($_.Filename -match "\d{2,7}" -eq "True")){  
     $_.Filename |Ft -autosize | out-string -width 4096  
   }  
  }  
 }  

From code above you can see we are retrieving all VMs in our environment, then the hard disk files of that VMs.
Of these hard disks we want to display snapshots only.

As you know VMware snapshots disk are named:

<VM_NAME>-<SNAPSHOT_NUMBER>.vmdk
Example: Win2008-000001.vmdk


So with:

$_.Filename -like "*-??????.vmdk"
we are looking for disks that contains -<SNAPSHOT_NUMBER>.vmdk and with

$_.Filename -match "\d{2,7}" -eq "True"
we are verifying that those esclamation marks *-??????.vmdk are numbers and NOT letters.

Without this control the PowerCLI script would return any vmdk which has a "-" and 6 letters before ".vmdk"

For example it would also return a VM disk named:

Win2008-DVLPMT.vmdk

which clearly is NOT a snapshot disk.

As always to run this script you need to connect to a vCenter server (or ESXi host) by using Connect-VIServer cmdlet.

That's all!!