I have the issue that we use a cloud automation software, which for whatever reason failed to delete the hypervisor snapshots.

Now I was looking into a quick way to delete all those 520 snapshots with PowerCLI, and I found something pretty quick.

Based on that, I came up with my own quick PowerCLI one-liner, that’ll list all VMs and their snapshots:

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Get-VM | Get-Snapshot  | Where { $_.Name -like "201502*" } | Format-Table -Property VM, Name, Created, Description, SizeMB -AutoSize

Now, I could use another one-liner to delete all snapshots, that’ll look like this:

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Get-VM | Get-Snapshot  | Where {$_.Name -like "201502*"} | Remove-Snapshot -Confirm:$false -RunAsync

However, this will either crash an ESXi host (because the amount of the snapshots is too much) or overwealm the storage. So in the end I used a script like this:

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$maxtasks = 5

$snaps = Get-VM | Get-Snapshot | Where { $_.Name -like "201502*" }

$i = 0
while($i -lt $snaps.Count) {
	Remove-Snapshot -Snapshot $snaps[$i] -RunAsync -Confirm:$false
	$tasks = Get-Task -Status "Running" | where {$_.Name -eq "RemoveSnapshot_Task"}
	while($tasks.Count -gt ($maxtasks-1)) {
		sleep 30
		$tasks = Get-Task -Status "Running" | where {$_.Name -eq "RemoveSnapshot_Task"}
     }
     $i++
}

This’ll limit the maximum amount of snapshots to delete at times to 5 (or 10 if you change the $maxtasks value).