FlashArray vSphere Web Client now supports vSphere 6.7

Quick post–if you are looking at using vSphere 6.7, please note that only version of our plugin that works with 6.7 is version 3.1.x or later. There were some API changes that prevent it from properly loading in the 6.7 interface.

Reach out to support if you would like the latest version! This is still only for the Flash vSphere Web Client. We are working on building an HTML-5 supported one. Stay tuned on that.

Release notes are as follows:

What’s New

vSphere 6.7 Support
This release of the plugin includes support for vSphere 6.7. Users requiring support for vSphere 6.7 must upgrade to this version of the vSphere client plugin.

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What’s New in Core Storage in vSphere 6.7 Part IV: NVMe Controller In-Guest UNMAP Support

vSphere 6.7 core storage “what’s new” series:

Another feature added in vSphere 6.7 is support for a guest being able to issue UNMAP to a virtual disk when presented through the NVMe controller.

Continue reading “What’s New in Core Storage in vSphere 6.7 Part IV: NVMe Controller In-Guest UNMAP Support”

What’s New in Core Storage in vSphere 6.7 Part III: Increased Storage Limits

vSphere 6.7 core storage “what’s new” series:

In ESXi 6.0 and earlier, a total of 256 devices and 1,024 logical paths to those devices were supported. While this may seem like a tremendous amount of devices to some, there were plenty who hit it. In vSphere 6.5, ESXi was enhanced to support double both of those numbers. Moving to 512 devices and 2,048 logical paths.

In vSphere 6.7, those numbers have doubled again to 1,024 and 4,096 logical paths. See the limits here:

https://configmax.vmware.com/

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PowerCLI and VVols Part I: Assigning a SPBM Policy

There are a variety of ways to assign and set a SPBM Policy to a VM. I recently put out a workflow package for vRO to everything VVols and Pure:

vRealize Orchestrator VVol Workflow Package

I also specifically blogged about assigning a policy to a VM with vRO:

Assigning a VVol VM Storage Policy with vRO

How do you do this with PowerCLI?

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What’s New in Core Storage in vSphere 6.7 Part II: Sector Size and VMFS-6

vSphere 6.7 core storage “what’s new” series:

In vSphere 6.5, a new version of VMFS was introduced–VMFS-6. A behavior that many noted was that it was not always the default option for their storage. ESXi (unless told otherwise) would default to formatting some storage with VMFS-5. So when you installed ESXi, the default datastore that gets created would be VMFS-5.

The issue with this was that VMFS-5, was well not VMFS-6. Not automatic UNMAP etc. Furthermore, there is no upgrade path besides deleting the file system and then reformatting with VMFS-6. This of course was a bit annoying for many.

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What’s New in Core Storage in vSphere 6.7 Part I: In-Guest UNMAP and Snapshots

vSphere 6.7 core storage “what’s new” series:

Been excited to do this series for awhile! Excited to see vSphere 6.7 released–there is a lot in it.

So as I did for 6.5, I am going to write a few posts on some of the core new storage features in 6.7. This is not going to be an exhaustive list of course, but some of the ones that I find interesting.

Let’s start with UNMAP!

Continue reading “What’s New in Core Storage in vSphere 6.7 Part I: In-Guest UNMAP and Snapshots”

Updated PowerCLI Best Practices Scripts Check/Set

One of our continuing goals at Pure Storage is to simplify your life (when it comes to storage and VMware of course, your personal life is your own thing). So as much as possible, we try to reduce the number of things to set in vSphere to “work” better with the FlashArray. We don’t have configuration options on the array, so if we require you to make some kind of settings change on a host that is opened up as a bug internally at Pure: can we make the array respond/behave in a way that the change isn’t necessary?

As of the latest releases of vSphere (in 6.0 and in 6.5) our multipathing best practices are default (Round Robin and IO Operations Limit of 1). So one less thing.

Though there are a few things depending on your environment that need/should be set. Many of these are by default set correctly, so we merely check for those. A few still however need to be changed.

I have updated my blog post here:

FlashArray VMware Best Practices PowerCLI Scripts

See that for details.

Highlights are:

  • Improved interactivity of scripts
  • Specific cluster support
  • iSCSI setting fixes
  • VMFS-6 support for auto-unmap
  • Improved logging
  • Better PowerCLI module handling
  • Disk.DiskMaxIOSize support

Enjoy!