ESXi and the Missing LUNs: 256 or Higher

A customer pinged me the other day and said they could not see a volume on their ESXi host. Running ESXi version 6.5. All of the normal stuff checked out, but the volume was nowhere to be seen. What gives? Well it turned out to be the LUN ID was over 255 and ESXi couldn’t see it. Let me explain.

The TLDR is ESXi does not support LUN IDs above 255 for your average device.

UPDATE (8/15/2017) I have been meaning to update this post for awhile. Here are the rules:

ESXi 6.5 does support LUN ID higher than 255, but only if those addresses are configured using peripheral LUN addressing. If your array uses flat addressing, it will not work (which is common for higher level LUN IDs).

ESXi 6.7 does now support flat LUN addressing so this problem goes away entirely.

See this post for more information on ESXi 6.7 flat support.

*It’s not actually aliens, it is perfectly normal SCSI you silly man.

Continue reading “ESXi and the Missing LUNs: 256 or Higher”

Unattended VMFS UNMAP Script

I updated my UNMAP PowerCLI script a month or so ago and improved quite a few things–but I did remove hard-coded variables and replaced it with interactive input. Which is fine for some, but for many it was not.

Note: Move to VMFS-6 in vSphere 6.5 and you don’t have to worry about this UNMAP business anymore 🙂

Essentially, quite a few people want to run it as a scheduled task in Windows, and if it requires input that just isn’t going to work out of the box. So I have created an unattended version of the script. For details read on.

Note: I will continue to update the script (bugs, features, etc.) but will note them on my other blog post about the script here:

Pure Storage FlashArray UNMAP PowerCLI Script for VMware ESXi

I will only update this post if the unattended version changes in a way that makes these instructions wrong. Continue reading “Unattended VMFS UNMAP Script”

Importing a VVol Snapshot with PowerCLI

This is all very exciting for me, finally able to really start blogging about VVols in earnest. As you may or may not be aware we (Pure Storage) currently have our VVol implementation in beta. So I can finally start digging into some VVol work. Not going to get into implementation details just yet, but instead a quick walkthrough of importing a VVol snapshot with PowerCLI.

First, enjoy a poorly photoshopped Back To the Future reference:

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Multi-site FlashArray Configuration with Site Recovery Manager

The FlashArray Storage Replication Adapter for VMware Site Recovery Manager supports many:many replication since the 2.0 release of the SRA. Use of test failover, failover and reprotect is no different than with 1:1, and nor is the setup of the volumes. The only real difference is how you configure the array managers in SRM. So let’s review how this is done.

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Hiring! Looking for a Virtualization/Automation focused Solutions Architect

Hey all! We have a new position that has opened up at Pure Storage for a Solutions Architect that will be focused on virtualization and automation. Apply here:

https://boards.greenhouse.io/purestorage/jobs/651394

So that is the job posting, but let me talk in more detail about what it entails.

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