Using the Chrome Advanced REST Client with the FlashArray

A question came up on our community about a Chrome extension called Advanced REST Client and I had never used it before, so I decided to check it out. Install it here. It will add an extension that allows you to make REST calls to, well whatever from your Chrome browser.

***UPDATE My coworker Barkz did an excellent post about this a few months back too, so check it out too***

Of course there are a billion ways to do this (I traditionally have just used Invoke-RestMethod in PowerShell) but this is another one for your tool arsenal . A quick and easy way to pull REST information from the FlashArray without having to learn another tool like PowerShell to do it.

download

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VMFork, InstantClone, Project Fargo Oh My! Part 1: Walkthrough

One of the things in vSphere 6.0 that I really wanted to look at was the Instant Clone functionality that was included in the release. Instant Clone (AKA Project Fargo AKA VMFork) is the ability to essentially instantly create new virtual machines that are identical copies of a running parent VM by sharing the current memory and virtual disk files of that parent. The “forked” VMs are basically resumed copies of a stunned parent and the disk write/memory changes are committed down to delta VMDKs or delta memory pages while the children continue to read from any unchanged data in the parent VMDKs.

Fargo-poster

Plenty of other people have gone into more detail on this and the architecture, so instead of me re-writing all of this check out this post from Duncan Epping:

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2014/10/07/project-fargo-aka-vmfork-what-is-it/

Or Google it.

Cool stuff. So I plan on doing a few different posts on this, tons of thoughts how this could be used, this first post though will focus on just simply setting it up. Continue reading “VMFork, InstantClone, Project Fargo Oh My! Part 1: Walkthrough”

VMware SRM and the PBM & PreCloneCheckCallback error

Quick post here. I recently updated my environment to vCenter 6.0 Update 1 and VMware Site Recovery Manager 6.1 and after my first attempted test failover (and subsequent ones) the test would always fail when it tried to power on the virtual machines. Some powered-on and some didn’t. The following errors appeared for about half of my VMs:

error

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Pure Storage vSphere Web Client Plugin and Multiple vCenters

I was working on rebuilding my VMware lab environment today and for simplicity’s sake decided to leverage two external Platform Services Controllers (PSC), one for each of my vCenter environments (I need two because I am setting up Site Recovery Manager) in a federated manner. Akin to the previous term of “linked mode” If you are not familiar with PSC which was added in vSphere 6.0, check out this KB. I went with the 3rd deployment model illustrated in this KB. Continue reading “Pure Storage vSphere Web Client Plugin and Multiple vCenters”