Making snapshot on Nutanix from guest VM using Nutanix API

If you prefer full control inside the VM (or you want something more tailored per workload), following approach is to run a pre-snapshot script (quiesce), trigger the snapshot via API, then run a post-snapshot script (resume).

1. Pre-snapshot (example)

#!/bin/bash
set -e
systemctl stop mysqld || true
sync
fsfreeze -f /data

2. Snapshot trigger (API example )

#!/bin/bash

VM_UUID="xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx"

curl -k -u 'apiuser:apipass' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -X POST "https://<PRISM-IP>:9440/api/nutanix/v3/snapshots" \
  -d '{
    "spec": {
      "resources": {
        "entity_uuid": "'"$VM_UUID"'",
        "snapshot_type": "CRASH_CONSISTENT"
      },
      "name": "snap-from-inside-'"$(date +%F-%H%M)"'"
    }
  }'

3. Post-snapshot (example)

#!/bin/bash
set -e
fsfreeze -u /data
systemctl start mysqld || true

This route can work well when you want custom quiescing logic, but it does add some moving parts (API auth/endpoint, error handling, timeouts, etc.).