hcidude's blog

Snapshots in VMware environments can be a double-edged sword: great for short-term recovery, but problematic if left unmanaged. In this post, I’ll show you how to use Ansible with a dynamic inventory to list all snapshots across your virtual machines (VMs) — and cleanly handle VMs without any snapshots.

We’ll be using the community.vmware.vmware_guest_snapshot_info module to collect snapshot information from vSphere. The approach works perfectly for environments managed via a dynamic inventory, where VM-specific details like name and folder come from the inventory itself.

---

The Playbook

Here’s the playbook list_all_vm_snapshots.yaml that does the work :

---
- name: Get a list of VM snapshots using dynamic inventory
  hosts: all
  gather_facts: no

  tasks:

    - name: Gather snapshot info 
      community.vmware.vmware_guest_snapshot_info:
        hostname: "{{ vcenter_hostname }}"
        username: "{{ vcenter_username }}"
        password: "{{ vcenter_password }}"
        datacenter: "{{ datacenter_name }}"
        name: "{{ hostvars[inventory_hostname].name }}"
        folder: "{{ hostvars[inventory_hostname].path }}"
        validate_certs: false
      register: snapshot_info
      delegate_to: localhost

    - name: Output snapshot info if snapshots exist
      debug:
        msg: "Snapshots for VM {{ inventory_hostname }}: {{ snapshot_info.guest_snapshots.snapshots }}"
      when: >
        snapshot_info.guest_snapshots is defined
        and snapshot_info.guest_snapshots.snapshots is defined
        and snapshot_info.guest_snapshots.snapshots | length > 0

    - name: Output if no snapshots exist
      debug:
        msg: "No snapshots found for {{ inventory_hostname }}"
      when: >
        snapshot_info.guest_snapshots is not defined
        or snapshot_info.guest_snapshots.snapshots is not defined
        or snapshot_info.guest_snapshots.snapshots | length == 0

---

Key Points

1. Dynamic Inventory Support

This playbook assumes that you’re using a dynamic inventory plugin like vmware_vm_inventory, which provides VM-specific variables such as name and path.

2. Robust Snapshot Detection

Some VMs won’t have the guest_snapshots attribute at all if no snapshots exist. To avoid errors, the when condition checks whether:

• guest_snapshots is defined
• snapshots is defined within it
• the snapshots list has entries

This ensures clean output and prevents undefined variable errors.

3. Local Execution with delegate_to

Snapshot queries are run locally on the control node, not on the VM itself.

---

Example Output

Here’s what output might look like:

TASK [Output snapshot info if snapshots exist]
ok: [vm01] => {
  "msg": "Snapshots for VM vm01: [{'name': 'PrePatch', 'description': 'Before Patch', ...}]"
}

TASK [Output if no snapshots exist]
ok: [vm02] => {
  "msg": "No snapshots found for vm02"
}

---

Wrapping Up

This playbook provides a solid base for snapshot management in Ansible. You can expand it by:

• Sending reports via email
• Failing the play if snapshots are older than a certain threshold
• Automatically removing snapshots based on policies

📌 Want to automate cleanup? Stay tuned — the next blog post will cover that!