Snapshot management with Windows PowerShell

On a Microsoft Hyper-V system, you can use Windows PowerShell cmdlets to remove (undo) snapshots that were created by IBM Spectrum Protect for a Hyper-V virtual machine.

You can use these cmdlets only on the Hyper-V system. You cannot remove snapshots from the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

Hyper-V systems issue cautionary messages to discourage you from editing virtual hard disks that contain snapshots, or virtual hard disks that are associated with a chain of differencing (incremental-forever) snapshots. Instead, use the cmdlets to manage snapshots to minimize the risk of data loss.

For a list of cmdlets that are available for Hyper-V, go to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh848559.aspx and read the information for the available cmdlets. Use the Get-VMSnapshot cmdlet with the -SnapshotType Recovery parameter to retrieve snapshots that are associated with a virtual machine (VM). Use the Remove-VMSnapshot cmdlet to remove a snapshot. Removing a snapshot merges the information that the snapshot wrote to the snapshot differences file (the AVHDX file) back to the VM hard disk (the VHDX file).

If multiple types of snapshots exist for a VM, you can filter the results by snapshot type when you remove a snapshot. For example, to remove only those snapshots that have the snapshot type of "recovery", run the following cmdlet:

get-vmsnapshot * | where snapshottype -eq recovery | remove-vmsnapshot