VMWare Special Agent - Finding Hidden Snapshots

CMK version: 2.0.0p9
OS version: CentOS 7

This might be more of a special agent question and a vCenter question than anything, but so far, it has me somewhat fooled, and I’m looking for some advice.

Somewhere on my vCenter setup, there appears to be a very hidden snapshot that my PowerCLI tools cannot seem to locate. When I do a very basic PowerCLI command of:

get-vm | get-snapshot

I get a return of two snapshots, both fairly recent. However, when my ESX special agent runs on this server, it constantly returns that there are three snapshots, one of which is six years old!

I have it checking snapshots at a vCenter level because while the agent is on most servers, it’s not on all, and piggyback data isn’t a great option in this environment, at least not yet.
What ideas might people have here to help locate where this hidden / orphaned snapshot is being detected from, or can I add a ton more verbosity to the special agent output to see which VM it sees it on?

Thanks!

Hi,

if you speak german you can have a look at this thread :

I like RVTools for detailed lists of about anything in a vCenter - hosts, VMs, …

But I’m not sure if it will show you something that PowerCLI doesn’t show.

Could that mystery snapshot perhaps be on a template, not on a normal VM?

Well to answer both of these:

  1. I do not read German but DeepL translates like a champ, and it uncovered this command. I’m going to bookmark / save that page, because it was extremely helpful for verification.

  2. RVTools downloaded did detect what you suspected was the root cause. The snapshot is embedded in a very old template. I can’t imagine it’s one we need, but if we do, I will go the route of converting to a VM, removing the snap, and re-converting to a template.

Thanks!

1 Like

by the way,
you can do some cool things with RV Tools using the cli and having someone who can code
A great tool for daily reports.
For example importing all informations in a database and using cmk to check results via sql.
Poor mens esxi management without vsphere.
Ralf

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