re this, for anyone trying to figure it out: Various combinations of null and empty lists for the DiskAttachments and Disk fields in the snapshot builder still resulted in all VM Disks being included. Having revisited this today, and after some experimentation, I got this workaround to behave as expected: List<DiskAttachment> attachments = new ArrayList<>(); attachments.add(new DiskAttachmentBuilder().build()); SnapshotBuilder builder = new SnapshotBuilder().vm(vm).name("Snap").description("Test").diskAttachments(attachments).disks((Disk) null).persistMemorystate(false); By adding the dummy attachment to the list, the resulting snapshot will have no disks. I imagine this circumvents some check like if(chosenAttachments.size == 0 || chosenAttachments == null){ chosenAttachments.addAll(vm.diskAttachments); } Slightly hacky, but functional. Possibly an RFE worth looking at?