You are correct, vimsh is quite powerful but also not documented well. You can find some information at our site regarding vimsh at:
I've not extensively used the snapshot functionality with more than 1 level deep snapshot but generally the value will start from 0 and increment, I forge if it was 0 to 1 top to bottom or vice-a-versa.
Say you have a VM named Quentin and it's currently in a powered off state and you would like to capture the state that it's currently in, which is off. You would do something of the following:
[root@himalaya ~]# vmware-vim-cmd vmsvc/snapshot.create 256 powered_off_snapshot powered_off_state 0 0 Create Snapshot:
Note: You'll need to locate the corresponding VmId by doing "vmware-vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms" if you're not aware of that already
Now, you would power on your VM and do some work/etc. and then at some point later you would like to revert the VM back to the snapshot, you would do something of the following:
[root@himalaya ~]# vmware-vim-cmd vmsvc/snapshot.revert 256 0 0 0 Remove Snapshot: |-ROOT --Snapshot Name : powered_off_snapshot --Snapshot Desciption : powered_off_state --Snapshot Created On : 9/8/2009 14:8:40 --Snapshot State : powered off
Note: The syntax to reverting a snapshot is: Usage: snapshot.revert vmid suppressPowerOff \[snapshotLevel\] \[snapshotInde\] and the snapshotLevel and Index really just refers to the dept of the snapshot tree and if there are any branches. You can easily figure this out by doing some testing and leave one of the value to 0 and change the other value to see if it's going to the right snapshot. In our simple example, we will surpressPowerOff and use level 0 and index 0 to revert back to our single snapshot which will bein a powered off state
Hopefully this gives you an idea of how the command works and I would just say run a few tests and you should be able to figure out what those values map to within your snapshot tree but if you have a single snapshot, then it should be pretty trivial to revert.
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William Lam
VMware vExpert 2009
VMware ESX/ESXi scripts and resources at:
VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators
If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".
I actually just got it working .... the issue lies with having that single 'ROOT' snapshot. If you remove that, then you can effectively get to any of the branches where snapshotLevel defines the individual branches which start from 0 and up, this would be your snap_0_0 and snap_1_0 and snap_2_0. The snapshotIndex would be the child snapshots such as 0_1,0_2,1_1,1_2,etc.
Here is an example:
[root@himalaya ~]# vmware-vim-cmd vmsvc/snapshot.get 256 Get Snapshot: |-ROOT --Snapshot Name : snap_0_0 --Snapshot Desciption : --Snapshot Created On : 9/8/2009 14:50:52 --Snapshot State : powered off --|-CHILD ----Snapshot Name : snap_0_1 ----Snapshot Desciption : ----Snapshot Created On : 9/8/2009 14:51:17 ----Snapshot State : powered off |-ROOT --Snapshot Name : snap_1_0 --Snapshot Desciption : --Snapshot Created On : 9/8/2009 14:52:1 --Snapshot State : powered off --|-CHILD ----Snapshot Name : snap_1_1 ----Snapshot Desciption : ----Snapshot Created On : 9/8/2009 14:52:21 ----Snapshot State : powered off |-ROOT --Snapshot Name : snap_2_0 --Snapshot Desciption : --Snapshot Created On : 9/8/2009 15:8:2 --Snapshot State : powered off
I think what happens is when you first create a snapshot, a single root is referenced. So all snapshots under that root are considered children and from what I can see from my testing, you can't acess the other child tree as you've mentioned already. If you go back and just delete the main root, then each of the main children become their own 'ROOT' node and then the subsequent snapshot under each root are the children snapshot. In this case you can access the 3 root's by doing (0,1), (0,2) and (0,3) respectively based on my sample.
This has just been some simple testing, in terms of why ... I'm still not sure
=========================================================================
William Lam
VMware vExpert 2009
VMware ESX/ESXi scripts and resources at:
VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators
If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".