This is going to be broken up into two parts- first, a live migration where no VMs get powered off during the migration; second, a migration where you temporarily power off VMs attached to the SCSI datastore.
Why would you want to do it one way or another?
Pros of live migration:
No VM downtime
Simpler configuration changes and overlap. Less to go wrong or mess up
Pros of powering off VMs:
The total migration time will be significantly less because no data will have to be moved. Currently VMware doesn’t support XCOPY (even on the same array) for NVMe-oF
We are excited to announce the launch of the latest version of Pure Storage’s remote vSphere plugin, 5.1.0. It includes a number of bug fixes PLUS a highly sought after feature: vVols VM point-in-time (PiT) recovery!
Why am I excited about this feature?
With vVol PiT VM recovery, you can now easily recover an entire VM that was accidentally deleted (and eradicated) or you can restore the state of a VM back to a point in time that you took a snapshot from vCenter directly while using Pure’s vSphere plugin.
The requirements of this are Pure’s vSphere remote plugin 5.1.0 and Purity™ 6.2.6 or higher for PiT revert and for PiT VM undelete with a vVol VM that has had its FlashArray™ volumes eradicated from the FlashArray itself. If you’re undeleting a vVol VM that has not been eradicated yet, that functionality is present for Purity versions 6.1 and lower.
For PiT VM revert, you will also need to make sure that you have snapshots of all of the volumes associated with the vVol VM except swap- at least one data volume and one configuration volume.
For VM undelete before the volumes have been eradicated, you will need a snapshot of the vVol VM’s configuration volume.
For VM undelete after the vVol-backed VM has been eradicated, you’ll need a FlashArray protection group snapshot of all the VM’s data volumes, managed snapshots and configuration volumes.
Rather than rehash what my teammate Alex Carver has put a lot of work into, I’m just going to link to the KB and videos he created:
Download the new plugin (part of Pure’s OVA), read the release notes and test out vVol PiT recovery today! Like a lot of things, it’s better to have some understanding of what’s happening and why before needing something that might be part of your recovery process. Please note that you can also upgrade in-place from 5.0.0 to 5.1.0 (and future remote plugin releases) by following this guide.
This will be a short blog, partially because my teammate Alex Carver already wrote a great blog that covers one workaround for this button not working that uses vCenter’s MOB.
If you have been using self-signed certificates in your vVols environment since vCenter 6.7 and updated to vCenter 7.0, you might have noticed something frustrating when trying to refresh those certificates manually: the button was greyed out! If you were like me, you were probably wondering why this useful functionality was removed and thought maybe it was for security reasons; your concerns might have been validated when searching VMware’s KB system and finding this KB that read like it was functionality that was removed on purpose (recently updated to reflect the current situation better).
Turns out my guess was wrong and that KB was a little misleading. VMware has brought this button’s functionality back in vCenter 7.0U3d and higher. You might say to yourself “that’s great Nelson, but I don’t upgrade my production vCenter whenever a new vCenter version comes out”. If you want a simpler workflow than re-creating the storage providers before you upgrade to newer versions of vCenter when the certificates expire eventually, Alex Carver has the method for you which uses vCenter’s MOB to refresh the storage providers without re-creating them.
Pure Storage recently launched a new management pack for vROps that had a number of important fixes and some changes to the interface. You can download it here and find the full release notes here. What’s new?
Interface changes
Updated icons
Restructuring of Pure Storage objects in the Object view of vROps
Add Offload Snapshot capacity metric
Add FlashArray Software™ version property
Let’s go over the interface changes first. If you navigate to Environment -> Object Browser -> Pure Storage FlashArray -> FlashArray Resources -> PureStorage World and expand an array, the layout will look quite different than what was there before. For starters, the icons have almost all been updated to mirror what you would expect to see on a modern FlashArray Purity version (or vCenter if that is a vCenter object). We made this change to make the vROps management pack experience as close to the FlashArray experience as possible.
Additionally, we moved the structure of the objects around to be more consistent with what you’d expect from the FlashArray. No objects were removed and the same object can be listed in multiple places where it makes sense (for example, if you expand a Hosts group, you will see the pertinent volumes there as well as under the Volumes group).
Next, we’ve added the Offload Snapshot capacity metric in this version as well as a FlashArray Offload Target object. The Offload Target object is visible under Protection and you can see the current space used by that Offload Target in the badge for that object; additionally, there is a Capacity metric for this object that shows historical consumption.
Lastly, you can now retrieve the Purity version of the array directly from vROps to help plan your FlashArrays’ upgrades. This information is found by selecting a FlashArray and going to Metrics -> Properties -> Details -> Purity Version.
With the release of Purity 6.3, Native FA File replication has been added to the Pure Storage FlashArray™ software. This adds an often important feature to the FA File folder redirection solution I wrote about last year. Pure Storage is referring to this feature as ActiveDR for File Services.
ActiveDR for File Services is a useful feature if you’ve set up or are going to set up folder redirection on FA File and you would like the file data to be replicated asynchronously to a different array, whether that FlashArray hardware is at the same site or a different one. This feature is included with FlashArray.
This allows you to use your FlashArray for native block and file workloads that need the protection that replication provides and allow you to benefit from the great data reduction rate that FlashArray is known for with those replicated file sets.
Now, if you lose a site or an array for some reason, the file workload you have hosted on FA File can be recovered natively on FlashArray easily and quickly.
Late last year, I wrote a KB for a solution that I wanted to bring up here- hosting Horizon’s VDI user directories on FlashArray™ File with folder redirection controlled through a group policy object (GPO). I’d like to discuss this for a couple of reasons:
1. Configuring FA File was surprising easy, especially compared to what I remember from setting up a Windows file server was for the same purpose in a previous role. 2. Why I landed on using folder redirection for this KB instead of roaming profiles or another solution for user shares in a VDI environment.
When I have managed or set up VDI environments from scratch in previous jobs, there were always a ton of considerations that went into the VDI environment. From determining the appropriate amount of virtual resources to deploy to each VDI user to determining how much hardware I actually needed to buy to support the full deployment, each step can be more painful than the last. Any opportunity we can take to help ourselves be successful in the project is a good step to invest in. But when that step is easier and I don’t have to invest any resources to get the benefit of improving the success of the project, I have to take a step back and appreciate what just went so well.
It took me roughly 30 minutes to deploy and configure FA File in my existing Active Directory environment in my lab the first time. That included carefully digesting all the applicable new-to-me Pure documentation. From what I can recall with this process from my previous roles, that was at best a 2 hour job with a carefully put together and well documented Active Directory environment with automated Windows server deployments; at worst, that might have taken me a full day or two when I had to build everything from scratch. When any task took a day or more, I always had interrupts that would drag the process out and I ended up taking more time to review what I had done and what I needed to do from a documentation perspective.
On the point of why I used folder redirection instead of roaming profiles with Active Directory, VMware has this very helpful KB that outlines decisions you might make if you are using Dynamic Environment manager (DEM), but I think a lot of the points are applicable even if you aren’t using DEM. I’d like to highlight some disadvantages they list of roaming profiles:
Disadvantages -Large roaming profiles might get corrupted and cause the individual roaming profile to reset completely. As a result, users might spend a lot of time getting all personalized settings back. -Roaming profiles do not roam across different operating systems. This results in multiple roaming profiles per user in a mixed environment, like desktops and Terminal Services. -Potential for unnecessary growth of roaming profile, causing long login times.
When I saw these three specifically, I decided to go with folder redirection instead of roaming profiles. Anytime corruption is mentioned I try to avoid it. With VDI projects (let’s be real, most IT projects), you always want to minimize the impact to the end users partially because it will hurt adoption of it or reduce confidence from different groups in the company.
There is more to come with FA File and data protection, so please keep this blog in mind!
