A general system error occurred: Exceeded the maximum number of permitted snapshots” error when creating a virtual machine snapshot

Before upgrading my NSX-T nodes I wanted to take a snapshot. To my surprise, I was not able to do so, as I received an error message: Exceeded the maximum number of permitted snapshots. There were no snapshots for this particular virtual machine.

Having looked at the KB provided by VMware I learned that settings snapshot.maxSnapshots must be set to 0 to disable taking snapshots. However, as I am running vSphere 7.0 this setting is not listed by default in the Edit Settings menu of the virtual machine.

PowerShell to the rescue!

Hence I would need to manually enter this configuration setting and I have three nodes, I wrote a quick script to do it for me:

Disconnect-viserver *
Connect-VIServer hostname/IP_of_your_vCenter

What I like to do is to run the disconnect command to make sure I would not have any duplication sessions. And next to connect to vCenter.

$snapcheck = Get-VM | where name -Like "*nsxt*"

Now I am looking for all my NSX-T nodes. Once I have them in my $snapcheck variable I will do a test to see if this snapshot.maxSnapshots setting exist:

foreach ($snap in $snapcheck) {
$test = $snapcheck | Get-AdvancedSetting ‘snapshot.maxSnapshots’

If the napshot.maxSnapshots doesn’t exist, I will create new settings by using New-AdvanceSetting and set the value to 1. Otherwise, I will change it to value 1 where it’s not equal to 1.

if ($test -eq $null) {
         New-AdvancedSetting -Name snapshot.maxSnapshots -Value 1 -Entity -Confirm:$false -Force:$true
         }
         else {
              $test | where value -ne 1 | Set-AdvancedSetting -Value 1 -Confirm:$false
              }
}

The full script is on my Github repository, please feel free to download