ESXCLI updates in PowerCLI 6.3 R1

One of the changes in VMware vSphere PowerCLI 6.3 R1 was a much needed one: how the arguments are managed with esxcli commands. This was always a bit of a pain, especially for commands that have a lot of arguments. I won’t go into the detail on all of why/what of the changes here, as Alan Renouf already did that quite well here. So if you are unsure of the previous ugliness of esxcli in PowerCLI read that post before reading more here. Otherwise, continue on. I want to talk about some specific examples for storage-related commands that I use and many of our customers use quite commonly.

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FlashArray Deprecation of TLS 1.0 Support and the vSphere Web Client Plugin

In the recent release of the Purity Operating Environment on the FlashArray we deprecated TLS 1.0 support due to the ever growing list of vulnerabilities in it. Communication will be restricted to TLS 1.1 and later. Unfortunately, this affects some plugins/integrations. This is not an exhaustive list, but related to the ones VMware customers probably touch the most. If something is not listed ping the relevant support organization for more information.

The following plugins are NOT affected and will continue to work with Purity 4.7:

  • vRealize Operations Management Pack
  • vRealize Orchestrator Workflow Package
  • vRealize Log Insight Content Pack

The following are affected and will need to be upgraded to a specific version to work with Purity 4.7:

  • Site Recovery Manager Storage Replication Adapter (this needs to be version 1.5, which will be out soon)
  • vSphere Web Client Plugin (this needs to be version 2.0.10+)
  • VSS Provider (this needs to be version 1.0.2)
  • PowerShell SDK (this needs to be version 1.5)

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VMFS Snapshots and the FlashArray Part V: How to snapshot a VMFS on the FlashArray

This is part 5 of this 7 part series. Questions around managing VMFS snapshots have been cropping up a lot lately and I realized I didn’t have a lot of specific Pure Storage and VMware resignaturing information out there. Especially around scripting all of this and the various options to do this. So I put a long series out here about how to do all of this.

The series being:

  1. Mounting an unresolved VMFS
  2. Why not force mount?
  3. Why might a VMFS resignature operation fail?
  4. How to correlate a VMFS and a FlashArray volume
  5. How to snapshot a VMFS on the FlashArray
  6. How to mount a VMFS FlashArray snapshot
  7. Restoring a single VM from a FlashArray snapshot

Continue reading “VMFS Snapshots and the FlashArray Part V: How to snapshot a VMFS on the FlashArray”