I have a confession to make. It is dire in nature, and will likely surprise most of you. I’m lazy. So much so, that I’m a professional at it. I suppose that sounds pretty bad, and if my boss is reading this (I doubt he is), it’s also quite incriminating, so lets qualify a bit. I am not a fan of repetitive tasks, and as such, will do most anything in my power to not do them, or do them as easily as possible.
This comes in quite handy with virtualization, as well, it lends itself quite well to it (server instances contained within files, etc.). Fortunately, VMware makes this quite easy for us as well, providing many, many different methods of accessing their API (Application Programming Interface, or fancy programming speak for “That which is made of awesome”).
In fact they publish a pretty well documented API, and several SDK’s or software development kits for just this purpose. You can get info on these here.
As your Virtual Infrastructure is likely to be running at least one Windows box (Virtual Center). The VI Toolkit for Windows comes quite in handy.
The VI Toolkit for Windows is a set of PowerShell cmdlets for managing Virtual Infrastructure, that is easy to learn, and makes automation of routine tasks very, very simple.
Let’s take a look:
Connect-VIServer -Server $datacenter
Get-VM| Get-Snapshot| where{ $_.Created -le(Get-Date).AddDays(-7)}
So what’s it do? It connects to a virtual center server or esxhost $datacenter, gets a list of VM’s, and checks them for snapshots over 7 days old.