Delete All Snapshots on KVM with Virsh

scottalanmiller

With a quick command line, you can automate removal of all snapshots associated with a virtual machine. While you could write the VM name into the command line, you can also, as in my example, set a variable with the name of the VM so that a standard removal command can be used.

let vm="myVMname"
for snapshot in $(virsh snapshot-list $vm | tail -n +3 | head -n -1 | cut -d' ' -f2); do virsh snapshot-delete $vm $snapshot; done

It's not very commonly that you would want to automatically remove all snapshots from a VM in this manner. If this becomes a regular part of your routine, making this into a saved script would likely make sense.

scottalanmiller

If you want to automate this to remove all snaps from all VMs, you can just run this one command...

for vm in $(virsh list --all | tail -n +3 | head -n +1 | cut -d' '  -f7); do for snapshot in $(virsh snapshot-list $vm | tail -n +3 | head -n -1 | cut -d' ' -f2); do virsh snapshot-delete $vm $snapshot; done; done

Obsolesce

And in PowerShell:

Get-VM VMName | Remove-VMSnapshot -Name *

scottalanmiller

@obsolesce said in Delete All Snapshots on KVM with Virsh:

And in PowerShell:

Get-VM VMName | Remove-Checkpoint -Name *

Well, that's for Hyper-V and isn't PowerShell. PowerShell on KVM won't work that way as those are Hyper-V local commands being called from PowerShell, and not PowerShell itself.

scottalanmiller

@obsolesce said in Delete All Snapshots on KVM with Virsh:

And in PowerShell:

Get-VM VMName | Remove-Checkpoint -Name *

My Hyper-V hosts do not have this command. How do you get this to work? I can't find any Microsoft documentation on it, either.

Obsolesce

@scottalanmiller said in Delete All Snapshots on KVM with Virsh:

@obsolesce said in Delete All Snapshots on KVM with Virsh:

And in PowerShell:

Get-VM VMName | Remove-Checkpoint -Name *

Well, that's for Hyper-V and isn't PowerShell. PowerShell on KVM won't work that way as those are Hyper-V local commands being called from PowerShell, and not PowerShell itself.

Correct. They are PowerShell commands for Hyper-V.

scottalanmiller

Is this a personal alias to Remove-VMSnapshot perhaps?

Obsolesce

@scottalanmiller said in Delete All Snapshots on KVM with Virsh:

Is this a personal alias to Remove-VMSnapshot perhaps?

No I had that first but edited it incorrectly. Missed the VM in front.

But ya I thought vmcheckpoint was an alias but it's not.

Remove-VMSnapshot is correct.

So weird, they renamed it to checkpoint, but never changed the PS commands.