Announcing Pure Storage FlashArray VVol GA

This is a blog post I have been waiting to write for a long time. We at Pure Storage are pleased to announce that vSphere Virtual Volume support on the FlashArray is officially GA!

The FlashArray now supports running VVols in Purity 5.0.0 and later. The cool thing about the FlashArray is the flexibility of the Purity Operating Environment–so VVols are supported on all FA 400 models (405, 420, and 450), //M models (m10, m20, m50, m70) and FlashArray//X. Continue reading “Announcing Pure Storage FlashArray VVol GA”

Getting Started with vRealize Orchestrator and VVols

Over the past few weeks, I have been working on writing a vRealize Orchestrator workflow package for Virtual Volumes and the FlashArray. While that is not quite ready to go out, I think some basics for starting to use vRO and VVols are worth noting.

There are three main parts of using VVols with vRO:

  1. Core vCenter SDK–this is what you use to create VMs, datastores, etc.
  2. SMS–this is the service that manages storage providers (VASA) and replication for VVols.
  3. PBM–this is the service that you use for storage policy based features.

Continue reading “Getting Started with vRealize Orchestrator and VVols”

VCSA 6.5 Fails to Boot

So one of our field engineers reached out to me because they had a power outage of some sort and their vCenter appliance failed to boot with these errors about starting up the services.

So this is a common that has happened many times as seen from these KBs and community posts:

Etc. Etc.

Simple blog post, and this is really more for my own future reference. But could help you if you don’t have the common mount problems in the forums etc.

Continue reading “VCSA 6.5 Fails to Boot”

What is a VVol Datastore?

I have been traveling around lately talking about VVols and one of the most commonly misunderstood objects is the VVol datastore. What is it? What does capacity mean on it? Why does it even exist?

These are all good questions. The great thing about VVols is that very little changes in how the VMware user interacts with vSphere. But at the same time, what actual happens is VERY different. So let’s work through this.

Continue reading “What is a VVol Datastore?”

Issue with Consistent LUN ID in ESXi 6.5

Having consistent LUN IDs for volumes in ESXi has historically been a gotcha–though over time this requirement went away.

For example:

These days, the need for consistent LUN IDs is mainly gone. The lingering use case for this is Microsoft Clustering and how persistent SCSI reservations are handled. The below KB doesn’t mention 6.5, but I believe it to still be relevant to 6.5:

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2054897 Continue reading “Issue with Consistent LUN ID in ESXi 6.5”