"Remember kids, the only difference between Science and screwing around is writing it down" -Alex Jason (made popular by Adam Savage)
If you are Pure Storage customer and you recently logged into Pure1 (which is our cloud-based management/analytics/support portal), you might have noticed a notification the first time you logged in this week:
What is this? Well this is the great thing about Pure1–we just add features all of the time and this is an exciting one. Two years or so ago I wrote this blog post:
Understanding VMware ESXi Queuing and the FlashArray Continue reading “Configuring Pure1 VM Analytics”
I see a fair amount of requests around how to do different things with VMware PowerCLI and the Pure Storage PowerShell SDK. How do I correlate a VMFS to a volume? How do I create a new VMFS? How do I expand? Etc.
To help our customers I have written a module that includes a lot of the common operations people might need to “connect” PowerCLI to our PowerShell SDK.
The module is called Cody.PureStorage.FlashArray.VMware. Continue reading “Pure Storage and VMware PowerShell Module”
I am working on my PowerShell module for Pure/VMware operations and one of the cmdlets I am writing is for growing a VMFS. When perusing the internet, I could not find a lot of direct information on how to actually do this. There is not a default cmdlet for doing this.
The illustrious Luc Dekens talks about this problem here and even provides a great module for doing this:
If you just need want to run a quick script you can use that. If you want to write it yourself here is a quick overview of what you need to do. I am talking about a specific use case of:
My last post in this series was about getting a VVol UUID and figuring out what volume on a FlashArray it is. But what about the step before that? If I have a guest OS file system how do I even figure out what VMDK it is?
There is a basic option, which can potentially be used, which is correlating the bus ID and the unit ID of the device in the guest and matching it to what VMware displays for the virtual disks.
But that always felt to me as somewhat inexact. What if you accidentally look at the wrong VM object and then do something to a volume you do not mean to? Or the opposite?
Not ideal. Luckily there is a more exact approach. I will focus this particular post on Windows. I will look at Linux in an upcoming one.
Continue reading “PowerCLI and VVols Part IV: Correlating a Windows NTFS to a VMDK”
It is that time of the year again! VMworld 2018 is just around the corner.
We (Pure Storage) have a fair amount going on this year at VMworld and I am really looking forward to the show.
A big focus this year for us is VVols–we have seen excellent traction from our customer base–it didn’t take long for our VVol deployments to get to 100s of FlashArrays. We have a lot planned for VVols and there is a lot coming for the FlashArray around that.
So first off, how can you find out more about VVols? Well the simplest option is come stop by our booth–we will have demos galore around VVols and plenty of Pure employees to take your questions around them. Continue reading “VMworld 2018 and Pure Storage”
The next step if you want to do correlation between a VMware VVol VMDK pointer and its corresponding FlashArray volume using PowerCLI.
As a review, here are the previous posts in this series:
If you followed part 2, you now have your VVol UUID, so how do I correlate it to a volume? Well you could use the VM name and then look at the name of the volume and size, but this is not scientific, and certainly not exact.
Continue reading “PowerCLI and VVols Part III: Getting VVol UUIDs from the FlashArray”One of the first technical benefits users can enjoy around VVols is the use of snapshotting. Snapshots created through VMware of VMs have always been a point of contention which as severely limited their usability (see a post I did around the performance impact of them here).
With VVols, when you right-click on a VM and choose take snapshot, VMware does not create the performance-impacting delta VMDK files that were traditionally used, but instead VMware entirely offloads this process to the array. So the array creates the snapshots and VMware just tracks them.
But since VMs are now a collection of individual volumes on the array (a VVol is just an array volume) you can also snapshot and restore individual virtual disks as well directly on the array.
So what does all of this mean?
Continue reading “Virtual Volumes and Array Snapshots Part I: Managed Snapshots”
Now that all of the prerequisites are complete, it is time to start creating protection groups and recovery plans.
This is part 3 of this series, the earlier parts were:
In my last post, I walked through configuring ActiveCluster and your VMware environment to prepare for use in Site Recovery Manager.
Site Recovery Manager and ActiveCluster Part I: Pre-SRM Configuration
In this post, I will walk through configuring Site Recovery Manager itself. There are a few pre-requisites at this point:
Continue reading “Site Recovery Manager and ActiveCluster Part II: Configuring SRM”
About four years ago, we (Pure Storage) released support for our asynchronous replication and Site Recovery Manager by releasing our storage replication adapter. In late 2017, we released our support for active-active synchronous replication called ActiveCluster.
Until SRM 6.1, SRM only supported active-passive replication, so a test failover or a failover would take a copy of the source VMFS (or RDM) on the target array and present it, rescan the ESXi environment, resignature the datastore(s) then register and power-on the VMs in accordance to the SRM recovery plan.
The downside to this of course is that the failover is disruptive–even if there was not actually a disaster that was the impetus for the failover. But this is the nature of active-passive replication.
In SRM 6.1, SRM introduced support for active-active replication. And because this type of replication is fundamentally different–SRM also changed how it behaved to take advantage of what active-active replication offers. Continue reading “Site Recovery Manager and ActiveCluster Part I: Pre-SRM Configuration”