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Cookie4ddict
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How to stop vSphere from making snapshots?

Hi there!

I have a big problem (for me it's a big one - probably it's a small one for you guys). One of my ex colleagues had configured our virtual machines to take a snapshot of one of our virtual machines every week. Unfortunately the snapshots are really big and the process is making our machines really slow.

Now my problem: I tried to stop the snapshot task. Unfortunately I can't find where he started the task for generating them.

I already looked at the virtual machine, but the snapshot manager only showed old snapshots and all I was able to do is to delete them. Could you please help me? Where can I delete the task which forces the generating of snapshots Smiley Sad

We are using vSphere 5.0.

Thanks a lot!

With kind regards,

Steffi

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rcporto
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You can use the setting snapshot.maxSnapshots on virtual machine to disable take snapshots until you find the source of scheduled snapshots.

http://michlstechblog.info/blog/vmware-limit-the-maximum-number-of-snapshots/

To disable snapshot set the value of snapshot.maxSnapshots to 0.

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Richardson Porto
Senior Infrastructure Specialist
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/richardsonporto

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rcporto
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If you're using vCenter, check for Scheduled Tasks.... located on Home -> Management -> Scheduled Tasks.

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Richardson Porto
Senior Infrastructure Specialist
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/richardsonporto
a_p_
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Welcome to the Community,

there are several ways available to create snapshots. However, the most obvious one would be a scheduled task that was created on the vCenter Server. To see whether this is the case, login to the vCenter Server (using the vSphere client) and select the "Scheduled Tasks" icon on the "Home" screen.

André

Cookie4ddict
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Thanks for the hint - I found the scheduled tasks - but there are no visible tasks. Is it possible, that I am not able to see them if they are there? I'm logged in as an admin. One of my colleagues is logged in as admin too. We are both not able to find the task which is generating new snapshots every week

Regards,
Steffi

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a_p_
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It's also be possible that your colleague is running a script as a scheduled task/cron job from another server!?

André

martin_schmidt
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If you don't find, rename the VM and svMotion it away.

So it will be renamed also on the disk.

The job (whereever it is) will probably no longer find the VM.

Or you clone the VM and remove the old one.

rcporto
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You can use the setting snapshot.maxSnapshots on virtual machine to disable take snapshots until you find the source of scheduled snapshots.

http://michlstechblog.info/blog/vmware-limit-the-maximum-number-of-snapshots/

To disable snapshot set the value of snapshot.maxSnapshots to 0.

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Richardson Porto
Senior Infrastructure Specialist
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/richardsonporto
vNEX
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Hi,

it could be scheduled PoweCLI script on some machine (e.g. vCenter server) have a look at Task Scheduler on Windows machine... if its true you will find some logged-in/out events in vCenter under Events tab with account and IP information

you can match them to the timestamp of snapshot creation start time...

Just for proof its not scheduled task from vCenter verify task existence with command line  resp. PoweCLI functions below:

http://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/scripting/get-vcenter-scheduled-tasks-with-powercli-part-1/

_________________________________________________________________________________________ If you found this or any other answer helpful, please consider to award points. (use Correct or Helpful buttons) Regards, P.
Cookie4ddict
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Thanks for all your answers. Looks like it's really a PowerCLI Script... Thanks for the hint vNEX: Unfortunately, we aren't able to find the source where it has been stored. On top of that, my former colleague also isn't able to tell us where the script is stored - even after we asked him... So I used the "solution" of Richardson Porto. I know, it's not a solution at all and it's writing errors to the log instead of making snapshots, but at the moment it's all we could do until we find a new expert for our virtual machines.

If there would just be more time for my colleague and me to get into the materia...

Thanks again, you all helped me a lot Smiley Happy

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