Pure Storage – Page 11 – Cody Hosterman

February 13, 2019February 13, 2019

PowerCLI and VVols Part VIII: Running a Failover–Planned Migration

In the previous post in this series I explored how to run a VVol-based test failover of a virtual machine. Now I will walk through running an actual failover.

There are two types of failovers; a planned migration (everything is up an running) and a disaster recovery failover (part or all of the original site is down).

For this post, I will start with running a planned migration.

February 11, 2019February 13, 2019

PowerCLI and VVols Part VII: Synchronizing a Replication Group

In this post, I will overview how to synchronize a VVol-based replication group with PowerCLI. See previous posts below for more context:

This post is somewhat specific to Pure Storage–the cmdlets of course are universal, but behaviors may not correlate to your storage array. So if you are using VVols on a non-Pure array, certainly consult your vendor.

Furthermore, this is certainly specific to PowerCLI when it comes to the commands. With that being said, the fundamentals on how this works with Pure is common for all orchestration tools, so you should be able to use this information for other tools. Though of course the cmds/syntax will be different.

January 22, 2019January 26, 2021

Pulling Performance Statistics from Pure1 with PowerShell

I have written a few posts recently on using the Pure1 with PowerShell, like below:

I made a PowerShell module you make it easy for you to use, which can be installed via install-module from the PowerShell gallery. Details here:

https://www.codyhosterman.com/scripts-and-tools/pure1-rest-api/pure1-powershell-module/

January 12, 2019April 23, 2020

Using the Pure1 PowerShell Module

Recently I wrote a blog post on how to authenticate and connect to Pure1 via PowerShell. You can find that here:

I have made authentication MUCH easier:
https://www.codyhosterman.com/2019/12/pure1-rest-api-authentication-made-easy/

Using the Pure1 REST API Part I: PowerShell

But it is fairly involved, so I made it easier for you (and me) by writing a PowerShell module and posted in on the PowerShell Gallery.

https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/Cody.PureStorage.Pure1/

January 9, 2019March 8, 2019

Introducing the Pure1 REST API

Hello there! The FlashArray and FlashBlade products from Pure have always had a REST API service built in–this REST service allows you to manage, provision, and pull raw statistics from the array.

But there are two pieces missing:

You need to iterate through each array if you want to intelligently place a volume on it (or find a volume or whatever)
They only offer raw statistics–you need to do some crunching possibly to get what you want. Create projections and forecast, find how busy an array is, etc.

Luckily this is what Pure1 does for you. Every customer has access to our Pure1 web tool. This is something we host, all of your dial-home information gets fed into it. We use that information to figure out how “busy” an array is, when it will fill up from a capacity or performance perspective and much more. We now offer a REST API for Pure1 as well, so you can do some one-stop shopping for the information you need, that the arrays cannot natively provide.

January 3, 2019January 8, 2019

It’s 2019! Year in Review and A Few Twitter Recommendations

Happy New Year!! I don’t plan on this being a long post, but as I type this I think “Well I don’t really even have a plan on what this post will be”. So I take that back–this post will be of an indeterminate length.

2018 was an interesting year–for better or for worse I suppose. Let’s put politics and world affairs aside for now. Not enough time in the day for that.

2018 was great year for me personally, I got married, enjoyed a lot of backpacking, camping, and traveling with my wife. Had more than a few Ballast Point Sculpins. Played the heck out of Zelda Breathe of the Wild.

December 7, 2018March 5, 2019

PowerCLI and VVols Part VI: Running a Test Failover

This post I will talk about using PowerCLI to run a test failover for VVol-based virtual machines. One of the many nice things about VVols is that in the VASA 3.0 API this process is largely automated for you. The SRM-like workflow of a test failover is included–so the amount of storage-related PowerShell you have to manually write is fairly minimal.

November 19, 2018November 19, 2018

Announcing: Pure Storage Cloud Block Store for AWS

One of the fundamental features of the operating environment running on the FlashArray™ is the fact that the same software can run on many different hardware implementation of the FlashArray. This is one of the reasons that we can offer hardware Non-Disruptive Upgrades or when we introduce new features (even things as expansive as VVols) we can support it on older hardware. We support VVols going back to the FA 420-an array that was introduced before I joined Pure Storage® 4.5 years ago.

Furthermore, we have been having increasing conversations around the public cloud. Not just running applications in it, but moving data to and from it. DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) is an increasingly talked about use case. VMware Cloud in AWS is getting more and more attention at VMworld, and in general. We, at Pure get it. Will everything go to public cloud? No. Certainly not. Will everything stay on-premises? Also, of course not. Some customers will. Some will not at all. Many (most?) will use both in some capacity. So enabling data mobility is important.

Continue reading “Announcing: Pure Storage Cloud Block Store for AWS”

November 19, 2018

Top vBlog Voting 2018

It is that time of year again! Top vBlog voting! I would like to thank everyone who voted for me last year–I was absolutely humbled by all of the votes I received–so thank you.

Of course thanks to Eric Siebert at vsphere-land.com for running this year after year–this voting process is no simple task. To vote go here:

http://vsphere-land.com/news/voting-now-open-for-top-vblog-2018.html

A quick note on this blog… Continue reading “Top vBlog Voting 2018”

October 29, 2018October 31, 2019

PowerCLI and VVols Part V: Array Snapshots and VVols

Another post in my series on VVols and PowerCLI, for previous posts see these:

This post will be about managing one-off snapshots with VVols on the FlashArray with PowerCLI.

One of the still semi-valid reasons I have seen DBAs say “I dont want to virtualize because…” Is that they have simple snapshot/recovery scripts for their physical server that allows them to quickly restore DBs from snapshots. Doing this on VMFS requires A LOT of coordination with the VMware layer.

So they tell the VMware team–“okay I will virtualize but I want RDMs”. Well the VMware team says “well we’d rather die”

…and around in circles we go…

VVols provides the ability to provide this benefit (easy snapshot stuff) but still get the benefits of VMware stuff (vMotion, Storage vMotion, cloning, etc) without the downside of RDMs.

So let’s walk though that process.