How to take a snapshot from vCenter Manage Object Browser

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:
How to take a snapshot from vCenter Manage Object Browser.
 
Latest version of backup application, appliance always use createSnapshotEx API from vCenter Manage Object Browser(MOB). This KB explains how to take a snapshot from vCenter server MOB. Please do not skip any septs and do follow all the steps.

Log-into the vCenter MOB using administrator credentials  https://<vcenter FQDN or IP>/mob

Resolution

1. Log-into the vCenter MOB using administrator credentials https://<vcenter FQDN or IP>/mob the successful log-in page looks like below snap.

Imagine your vCenter inventory, which consists of vCenter name/ip in the top in the hierarchy followed by Datacenter, Cluster, and Virtual Machine. The same procedure has to be followed in the MOB. However, navigation is slight lengthy in the MOB




Most of the cases, the datacenter name will be always group-d1

In this given example, datacenter name is Nasa and followed by datastore where the VM is residing.



Upon selecting the datastore, it will list all the VMs on that datastore.


Select the specific VM, under the Methods, now you will have multiple options available.




There are two snapshot APIs.

1. CreateSnapshotEx enforces quiescing unless no quiescing is specified. By default VMware VSS snapshot provider is required for CreateSnapshotEx. 
2. CreateSnapshot detects if VSS service is installed, if not, it creates crash-consistent snapshot.

If you are troubleshooting an issue where VMware Tools Quiescence was enable, enter as  “TRUE” for the “quiesce” field. Otherwise leave both Boolean values set to FALSE.

Considering the Windows-OS, make sure volume shadow copy service is running or it is in manual state. (This is on-demand service).

But “Volume Shadow Copy” is Microsoft service. We can't continue without it. The description of “Volume Shadow Copy” also shows that: Manages and implements Volume Shadow Copies used for backup and other purposes. If this service is stopped, shadow copies will be unavailable for backup and the backup may fail. If this service is disabled, any services that explicitly depend on it will fail to start

NOTE: createSnapshot_taskEx feature will support only from 6.5 onwards. 



Snapshot creation is successful. VMware recommends to keep the snapshot maxmium of 72hours. Please do consider do delete the snapshot at the earliest.