ESXi

Hey guys,

Has anyone ever came accross a good script to do this? I am running ESXI 5.0(Free) and have a VM that I use as a lab enviroment. I am trying to see if a script can be done that will allow a VM to snapshot itself during certain times than revert the snapshot back to the "Gold" copy during a certain day - I also make sure I have a clean copy of the OS before I start breaking it.

I assume I can write something in Power CLI but wasnt sure if a script can be written to accomplish this before I started to dig into it more.

Thank you guys for your help!

using these can work from withing esxi itself.

vim-cmd vmsvc/snapshot.create [VmId] [snapshotName] [snapshotDescription] [includeMemory] [quiesced]

vim-cmd vmsvc/snapshot.create [VmId] [snapshotName] are needed

vim-cmd  vmsvc/snapshot.revert [VmId] [snapshotLevel] [snapshotIndex]

vim-cmd vmsvc/snapshot.removeall  [VmId]

to get your VMID do  vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms

This might help you understand vimID a bit more, http://sparrowangelstechnology.blogspot.com/2012/06/power-off-virtual-machines-via-command.html

but there is a lot out there.

Thanks for the fast reply!

Does the above method allow me to set a schedule task to automaticly run those commands? I know with ESX you have more access to the linux os to run commands but since ESXI is more restricted I am not sure if it allows schedule tasks to run on the local box or if I need to iniate it elsewhere to get the timing correct.

Thank you again!

This page might help you more

http://dcinfrastructure.blogspot.com/2011/01/create-and-delete-snapshots-on-schedule.html

it uses powershell, and you can sceduale it via windows scedualed tasks.

it would be preferable if you have multiple hosts/ vsphere itself better for growth.

vim-cmd would only work with one host.

Thank you for the responces. I ended up using your first suggestion and used a script to ssh into my esxi box and run the commands.