VCF Operations 9.1 Automation Central Enhancement for VM Snapshot Deletion

I was creating a VCF Operations Automation Central Job for deletion of VM Snapshots in my lab and noticed this!

I don't recall these options before 9.1, so I checked the Release Notes and sure enough, it's new! There were several Capacity related enhancements in 9.1, this is taken directly from the Release Notes.

Capacity Enhancements

• Enhanced Storage Capacity Visibility.

  Improved visibility into storage usage across vSAN, VMFS, NFS, and vVol datastore types on clusters, hosts, and VMs.

• Multiple Recommendations per VM.

  Delivery of multiple, simultaneous recommendations, such as rightsizing and snapshot reclamation, for a single VM regardless of its state (idle, powered off, or oversized).

• Automation Central Enhancements.

  Inclusion of idle and powered-off VMs when scheduling automated jobs for snapshot deletion and rightsizing in Automation Central.

• Orphaned Disks Deletion.

  Identification and deletion of orphaned disks to optimize system hygiene and storage reclamation.

• Exclusion Enhancements in Optimize.

  Options to exclude VMs from rightsizing and reclamation recommendations based on property tags, VM age, and history, along with automatic exclusion of Broadcom appliances.

• Scale Improvements for What-if Analysis.

  Increased limits for What-if analysis scenarios to support up to 10,000 VMs and 200 TB of storage capacity.

We are now including Idle and Powered-Off VMs for both VM Snapshot deletion jobs and VM Rightsizing jobs scheduled in Automation Central.

I ended up creating my VM Snapshot deletion job to include both Idle and Powered Off VMs and to filter out any Snapshots with "keep" in their name.

A small, but nice new feature in VCF Operations 9.1! And another way to reclaim more capacity in today's age of capacity restrictions/cost. Hope this was helpful, enjoy!