It may not be the fanciest of methods, but probably the quickest way to find VM snapshots is to use the ls command from the ESX Service Console. By piping the output with grep to find files with the snapshot extension, .vmsn, and using the recursive switch you can scan all the VMFS LUNs visible to an ESX host. That’s so simple it hurts!

To use the ls command to find snapshots do the following:

1. Log in to the service console (use putty or mRemote for remote log in)
2. Query for the snap shot files in the VMFS volumes

#ls -Ral /vmfs/volumes/* |grep .vmsn