How to take a Virtual Machine snapshot from vCenter Manage Object (MOB) Browser

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

• Backup applications use createSnapshotEx API to take virtual machine snapshots as part of backups.
• This article explains how to take a snapshot manually using API's from vCenter Manage Object Browser(MOB)

Environment

VMware vCenter Server

Resolution

• Log into vCenter MOB using administrator credentials at https://<vcenter FQDN or IP>/mob 
• Select Content

• Select group(Datacenters)

• Select the relevant datacenter. The datacenter name will be listed in the parenthesis

• Select the relevant datastore where the VM resides. Upon selecting the datastore, it will list all the VM's on the datastore

 

• Select a relevant VM and there will be multiple options under the method section

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.

Note: If VMware tools quiesing is required enter "True" in the quiesce field. Otherwise leave both Boolean values set to False.

• After entering the required Boolean values for memory and quiesce, click Invoke Method
• Virtual machine snapshot will be created. The same can be checked in snapshot manager

Note: CreateSnapshotEx is supported from 6.5 onwards. It is not recommended to keep virtual machine snapshots for long durations. Consider deleting the snapshots at the earliest.

Additional Information

For a windows VM, ensure volume shadow copy service is running or in a manual state. (This is on-demand service).

“Volume Shadow Copy” is a Microsoft service which 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