Category: Pure Storage

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Configuring an ESXi cluster for storage provisioning for a FlashArray via PowerShell

Phew that title is a mouthful. Sorry about that. But at least you know what I’m gonna talk about here. Nothing particularly profound, but obviously something every customer must do. I’ve been on a solid PowerShell kick as of late so why not put pen to paper here.

So whether you are using VVols or VMFS (or gross: RDMs) you need to do a bit of prep work to get things up and running. I will likely write a post on doing this with the vSphere Client Plugin, but for now let’s focus on doing it with PowerShell.

So step one is to install the PowerShell module that will help you. This is hosted on the PowerShell Gallery, so it is fairly simple to install:

install-module PureStorage.FlashArray.VMware

If you already have it installed, don’t forget to pull the latest version:

update-module PureStorage.FlashArray.VMware
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Generating the default VVol Storage Container ID

A VVol datastore, is not a file system, so it is not a traditional datastore. It is just a capacity quota. So when you “mount” a VVol datastore, you aren’t really performing a traditional mounting operation as there is no underlying physical storage to address during the mount. So instead of mounting some storage device, you are mounting what is called a storage container. This is the meta data object that represents the certain amount of capacity that can be provisioned from a given array. An array can have more than one storage containers, for reasons of multi-tenancy or whatever.

In a VMFS world, when you go to create a new datastore, you pass it the serial number of the storage you want to format with VMFS. You know that serial, because, well, you created the storage device. When you “mount” a VVol datastore, instead of a device serial, you supply the storage container UUID. It comes in the form of vvol:e0ad83893ead3681-b1b7f56a45ff64f1. Of course the characters will vary a bit.

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Installing the Pure Storage vSphere Plugin with PowerShell

A common question I hear is “can I install the Pure vSphere Plugin via PowerShell?” and my answer has been up until now, “sorry no :(”

But I was asked it twice last week and I decided to actually think about it? Why couldn’t it be automated? Just because we host in in the FlashArray and it is normally installed via our GUI? That GUI has to be executing code to do the install.

Installing a vSphere plugin is really two steps. First registering the plugin as an extension (this says what the plugin is, what version, etc). And then actually installing the plugin files to the vCenter. In a normal situation, someone logs into our GUI, connect to the vCenter and then runs the “install” which is really just registering the extension. In that registered extension, there is a link to where the plugin files can be downloaded from. This is step 2. At some point after registration, the vSphere Client downloads the files. In the Flash version, it happened the next time you logged in (this is why logging in took so long the first time you logged in after installing plugin). In the HTML-5 vSphere Client, this happens in the background, so there is no delay in logging in.

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Registering VASA with PowerShell

Registering VASA providers is the first step in setting up VVols for a given vCenter, so automating this process is something that might be of interest to folks. We currently have this process in our vSphere Plugin, as well as in our vRO plugin, and of course you can do it manually. What about PowerShell? Well we have that too!

In our PowerShell Pure/VMware module there are three new cmdlets:

  • new-pfavasaprovider
  • get-pfavasaprovider
  • remove-pfavasaprovider
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The Pure Storage Plugin for the HTML-5 vSphere Client

Finally! I know… You have been waiting for this and so have I. Our first release of our vSphere Web Client Plugin that supports the HTML-5 interface is officially released. Let’s walk through what it looks like!

The HTML-5 interface is vastly superior to the flash/flex based one, not only due to more accurate readouts, faster load times, but also the extensibility of the interface and guidelines around integration. Making it a much better platform for integration as compared to prior interfaces for vSphere.

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First Class Disks and VVols

One of the major advantages we have seen with VVols is making a virtual disk a first class citizen on the array. We can restore, copy, replicate them (and their VMs) as storage objects were meant to be restored, copied, replicated etc.

Though one thing about virtual disks is that by default–they are not first class citizens in vSphere, VVols or otherwise. To create one, it has to be associated with a VM.

To retrieve one in PowerCLI (for example) get-harddisk requires a datastore or a VM to return a result:

Same if I want to create a new one:

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Pure Storage Plugin v3 for vRealize Orchestrator

We just released an updated plugin for vRO today that is fully certified by VMware and is available on the VMware marketplace:

Download it here.

What are the new features? Well a lot–some various bug fixes, but this is mostly about new features:

  • ActiveCluster support
  • Enhanced protection group information
  • Throughput limits
  • Volume Groups
  • Pure1 REST API integration
  • Protocol Endpoints
  • Host Personality
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Photon-based SRM 8.2 and Pure

The first of two long anticipated VMware Site Recovery Manager updates is finally here! (the second being discussed here). A SRM appliance!

Since the dawn of time SRM was a Windows-based application. Requiring you to install, configure, and maintain Windows server and then install SRM on it. Certainly adding to the complexity of getting SRM up and running. Everything else VMware offers is an appliance why not this?

Well a couple reasons–but a primary one though is the ecosystem. SRM, unlike many other offerings relies vary heavily on ecosystem partner’s plugins. With essentially the single exception of vSphere Replication, SRM is useless without those vendor plugins, called Storage Replication Adapters (SRAs).

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NVMe-oF Support is now Released!

Today Pure Storage officially released support of NVMe-oF support on the FlashArray. This is another important step forward in the FlashArrays progress with NVMe. Prior to this, we have made a few incremental, but important improvements in the product to add full end-to-end support of NVMe:

  1. Converting our NVRAM devices to use NVMe
  2. Moving off of SSDs and adding custom NVMe-based flash modules in the FlashArray//X chassis
  3. Adding support for drive shelves that are connected via NVMe-oF
  4. Officially release NVMe-oF support for front-end workloads.

This has been a multi-step process that we spent a great deal of effort to make sure we were fully taking advantage of what NVMe in general has to offer.

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