Aria Operations Automation Central job to delete old snapshots from VMs is not selecting the expected set of VMs.

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

• An Automation Central job to remove 3 day old snapshots is not working correctly.  
• Attempting to configure a job to ignore VMs that have a specific tag:
• For example:
  • tag category='Snapshot Retention' with tag value='Snapshot Retention'
  • or tag category='Snapshots'   with tag value:'Snapshot Retention' 
  • This is expected to eliminate all VMs or only wants to delete the VMs with the tag. 

 

Environment

VMware Aria Operations 8.x

Cause

• The two retention tag categories were defined in two different filter criteria sets.

Resolution

• Use a single criteria set with And, instead of using 2 criteria sets based on the OR operator.
• Select the +ADD control to create the filter as shown in the example below.

 

• Defining the job to use a single criteria set, using the +ADD control logic to delete old snapshots on untagged VMs
  • Object Type = Virtual Machine
  • Properties: Disk Space|Snapshot|Age (Days) is greater than 3.0
  • AND
  • Tag Snapshot Retention not exists
  • AND
  • Tag Snapshots          not exists

 

Another example:

• To create a scheduled job to delete all snapshots over x days and not to delete snapshots of VMs with a tag category of snapshot-no-delete.
• Create a tag category of snapshot-no-delete and assign it to the required VMs
• Create the filter set as in the below screenshot.

This will ensure snapshots you do not want to delete are excluded from the job.