As many backup solutions use system of checkpoints (there are not just standard type of Checkpoints that you can do manually by using Hyper-V Manager (or Powershell) but also other types – like Recovery, Planned, Missing, Replica, AppConsistentReplica, and SyncedReplica (as per documentation).

Sometimes backup solutions are not able to clean up (Recovery) checkpoints after backup was finished so you might even not know that you have your VMs with open checkpoints in production. It can be problematic as it can fill your disk space on your hosts and then you can have problems when you remove this “orphaned” checkpoints and they need to merge to their parent VHDX.

I have created a simple Powershell script that can send you an e-mail once per day just to make sure that you can have under control situation regarding Checkpoints on your infrastructure. If there are no checkpoints there will be just a short e-mail, if there are checkpoints you will get table with VM name and Checkpoints.

To trigger this check you can use Task Scheduler and make a simple daily task like described in one of my early articles, here.

$VMCheckpoint = $null
$VMCheckpoint = get-vm | Get-VMCheckpoint
$VMCheckpointBody = get-vm | Get-VMCheckpoint | Select VMName, Name | ConvertTo-Html

If ($VMCheckpoint -eq $null) {
    $EmailTo = "it@mycompany.com"
    $EmailFrom = "hyper-v-checkpoints@mycompany.com"
    $Subject = "HYPER-VHOST01 - No Hyper-V Checkpoints found." 
    $Body = "Hi, IT! <br><br><br>There are no checkpoints on host HYPER-VHOST01. We will check again in 24 hours! <br><br><br>Armadillo Danilo"
    $SMTPServer = "smtp.mycompany.com" 
    $SMTPMessage = New-Object System.Net.Mail.MailMessage($EmailFrom,$EmailTo,$Subject,$Body)
    $SMTPMessage.IsBodyHTML=$true
    $SMTPClient = New-Object Net.Mail.SmtpClient($SmtpServer, 587) 
    $SMTPClient.EnableSsl = $true
    $SMTPClient.Credentials = New-Object System.Net.NetworkCredential("smtpauthusername", "smtpauthpassword"); 
    $SMTPClient.Send($SMTPMessage)
}

Else {
    $EmailTo = "it@mycompany.com"
    $EmailFrom = "hyper-v-checkpoints@mycompany.com"
    $Subject = "HYPER-VHOST01 - Warning! Hyper-V Checkpoints found!" 
    $Body = $VMCheckpointBody
    $SMTPServer = "smtp.mycompany.com" 
    $SMTPMessage = New-Object System.Net.Mail.MailMessage($EmailFrom,$EmailTo,$Subject,$Body)
    $SMTPMessage.IsBodyHTML=$true
    $SMTPClient = New-Object Net.Mail.SmtpClient($SmtpServer, 587) 
    $SMTPClient.EnableSsl = $true
    $SMTPClient.Credentials = New-Object System.Net.NetworkCredential("smtpauthusername", "smtpauthpassword"); 
    $SMTPClient.Send($SMTPMessage)
}