Deploying the Pure Storage OVA to vCenter 6.0

I will start this off with the usual rant. Why are you on vCenter 6.0?! It is going End of Support March 12th, 2020! https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/66977

But you likely know that and probably have your reasons and you didn’t come here for a lecture, you came here for an answer! Can I deploy the OVA to vCenter 6.0? Is it supported?

Let’s first clarify a few things. There are two different things when it comes to vCenter support with the collector. What it can be deployed TO and what it can collect FROM.

Let’s start off with what versions of vCenter it can collect from. We support collecting back to vCenter 5.5. The ESXi host versions that we support for collection in that vCenter lines up with whatever versions of ESXi that that particular vCenter supports. We support collection from versions up to the latest release of vCenter at the time of this writing–vCenter 6.7 U3. So collection support is from 5.5-6.7.x. As new vSphere releases come out we will add those at that time.

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Automating the Setup and Configuration of the Pure Storage OVA with PowerShell

A few weeks back we introduced the Pure Storage OVA which currently now focuses on the VM Analytics Collector and I blogged about deploying it with PowerShell:

https://www.codyhosterman.com/2019/10/deploying-the-pure1-vm-analytics-collector-ova-with-powershell/

This was only deploying the OVA, not configuring it. Once deployed, you need to (or might want to):

  • Change the default password
  • Add vCenters
  • Remove vCenters
  • Import configuration
  • Test phone home

Wouldn’t it be nice to do that all from PowerShell instead of SSH or the VM console? Of course it would! So I got to work on it! I have now updated my cmdlet Deploy-PfaAppliance to be able to reset the default password upon deployment and added a new cmdlet called Get-PfaAppliance to retrieve appliances and then configure them.

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Pure Storage Plugin 4.2.0 for the HTML-5 vSphere Client

Another quarter, another vSphere Plugin release from Pure! This is the release I have been really looking forward to as it sets the stage for a lot of the future work I want to build into the plugin. To recap:

  • 4.0.0 was our initial release of our plugin that only had the basic configuration support and VMFS management.
  • 4.1.0 was the 2nd release that added vVol support back into the plugin.
  • 4.2.0 enhances the plugin to add more vVol stuff into it as well as Pure1 Integration! So we are finally to the point where we are adding features into it that were never in the previous flash plugin. Yay!

So what are the new features?

  • Pure1 authentication
  • FlashArray fleet registration
  • Load meter integration
  • Pure1 tag integration
  • Intelligent provisioning
  • Full VM-undelete
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VMware Cloud Foundation and Pure Storage

A few weeks ago, VMware released the latest version of VMware Cloud Foundation, version 3.9. There were more than a few things in this release but one enhancement was around Fibre Channel:

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-Foundation/3.9/rn/VMware-Cloud-Foundation-39-Release-Notes.html

The release notes mention:

Fibre Channel Storage as Principal Storage: Virtual Infrastructure (VI) workload domains now support Fibre Channel as a principal storage option in addition to VMware vSAN and NFS.

vCF 3.9 Release Notes

So this leads to three questions:

  • What does this mean?
  • What does this mean for non-FC storage?
  • What was the stance around FC storage BEFORE this release?

Let’s answer the first question first.

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Gartner Critical Capabilities Report–Virtualization

FlashArray Receives the Highest Scores for Server Virtualization in 2019 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Solid State Arrays Report

This is a semi-non-technical post for once here, but somewhat of a state of the union which is something I’ve been meaning to write. A great thing to provide me with the impetus to do this is the recent 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage and the even more recent 2019 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Solid-State Arrays.

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