How to Create a Automation Job to Delete Snapshots with Aria Operations

Day 2 Operations are the most time-consuming tasks for every administrator. Let’s concentrate on monitoring and deleting snapshots. You need to monitor the retention period, take action to delete snapshots that violate internal compliances, etc.

You can easily transfer this task to Automation Central, an integrated feature that comes with Aria Operations. Let’s dive into how you can configure this feature. First, from the left menu, go to Operations –> Automation Central.

Click the “Add Job” button and select Reclaim.

Give a name to the job, such as “Delete Snapshots” and select “Delete old snapshots” from the Action Configuration.

You can set the age for the snapshots that are to be deleted. By default, it sets 7 days. Furthermore, you can decide and filter by the “Snapshot Size” and “Snapshot Name”.

On the next step, you need to define the scope. You can easily drag and drop objects from the right side to the left side to create your scope. The level of the selection can be at the vCenter Server, data center, cluster, folder, or even virtual machine level.

Once you define the object(s), you will have the filter criteria step as next. You can define the filtering criteria in this step.

Let’s add one filter as per the below use case.

What if the VM owner requires more time and asks not to delete the snapshot? This scenario can be achieved by using tags on the vCenter Server. Let’s say you create a new category called “VM Snapshot,” then create a tag called “Keep” and assign it to the VM Snapshot category. So, the VMe VM owner can assign this tag (manually or in an automated way) to his or her virtual machine if he/she wants to keep the snapshot longer.

All you need to do is set the filter to support this, like below.

You should be able to see the list of all virtual machines that are not tagged when you click the Preview Scope button.

Once you complete the filtering step and click on Next, the last step, called Schedule, will come up.

You can define the job’s start date, start time, recurrence, etc. Furthermore, you can configure to receive status notification mails that include job success, job failure, and a reminder 2 hours before the scheduled job run.

You can find an example schedule below.

Once you click the Create button, the automation job will be saved and can be visible on the calendar view in the Automation Central landing page.