PowerCLI and VVols Part IV: Correlating a Windows NTFS to a VMDK

My last post in this series was about getting a VVol UUID and figuring out what volume on a FlashArray it is. But what about the step before that? If I have a guest OS file system how do I even figure out what VMDK it is?

There is a basic option, which can potentially be used, which is correlating the bus ID and the unit ID of the device in the guest and matching it to what VMware displays for the virtual disks.

But that always felt to me as somewhat inexact.  What if you accidentally look at the wrong VM object and then do something to a volume you do not mean to? Or the opposite?

Not ideal. Luckily there is a more exact approach. I will focus this particular post on Windows. I will look at Linux in an upcoming one.

Continue reading “PowerCLI and VVols Part IV: Correlating a Windows NTFS to a VMDK”

VMworld 2018 and Pure Storage

It is that time of the year again! VMworld 2018 is just around the corner.

We (Pure Storage) have a fair amount going on this year at VMworld and I am really looking forward to the show.

A big focus this year for us is VVols–we have seen excellent traction from our customer base–it didn’t take long for our VVol deployments to get to 100s of FlashArrays. We have a lot planned for VVols and there is a lot coming for the FlashArray around that.

So first off, how can you find out more about VVols? Well the simplest option is come stop by our booth–we will have demos galore around VVols and plenty of Pure employees to take your questions around them. Continue reading “VMworld 2018 and Pure Storage”

PowerCLI and VVols Part III: Getting VVol UUIDs from the FlashArray

The next step if you want to do correlation between a VMware VVol VMDK pointer and its corresponding FlashArray volume using PowerCLI.

As a review, here are the previous posts in this series:

If you followed part 2, you now have your VVol UUID, so how do I correlate it to a volume? Well you could use the VM name and then look at the name of the volume and size, but this is not scientific, and certainly not exact.

Continue reading “PowerCLI and VVols Part III: Getting VVol UUIDs from the FlashArray”