Are you a vSphere Admin facing complaints of Virtual Machine slowness? Are rogue, stale and abandoned Snapshots infesting your infrastructure? Boy have I got the script for you!
Sorry about the “as seen on TV” intro, but as a vSphere admin sometimes snapshots do get out of hand. Below is a simple little one-liner using Get-Snapshot Cmdlet to get a list of all snapshots in your environment.
The One-Liner
Get-VM | Get-Snapshot | Select @{Label = "VM"; Expression = {$_.VM}}, @{Label = "Snapshot Name";Expression = {$_.Name}}, @{Label = "Created Date"; Expression = {$_.Created}} , @{Label = "Snapshot Size"; Expression = {$_.SizeGB}} | Export-Csv "snapshot_details.csv"Script breakdown:
The one-liner will output:
- The virtual machine which has the snapshot
- The name of the snapshot
- The date the snapshot was created
- The size of the snapshot
This one is fairly simple.
Get-VM when executed alone gets the list of all VMs of the vCenter, which is then piped to (executes like a foreach loop on the next command) the Get-Snapshot Cmdlet which gets all the information of a snapshot of that particular VM (like you specified it like this – Get-Snapshot -VM vm_name)
Then we simply select what we want to output. The Get-Snapshot Cmdlet fetches the following data:
To select, simply add a @{Label = “basically the column name”; Expression = {$_.theParameterThatYouWant}} block to the SELECT statement of the one-liner. You can add as many columns like this as you want separated by commas.
And that is it. In a future post maybe I will pursue how to select snapshots that are older than x number of days and things like that. But until that day comes, hope you enjoyed this one and found it to be useful!
Leave a comment, share and follow me on Social Media! Happy Scripting!
