Category Archives: VMware

Pure Storage, VAAI, VMware

What’s New in Purity 5.1: WRITE SAME Handling Improvement

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In Purity 5.1 there were a variety of new features introduced on the FlashArray like CloudSnap to NFS or volume throughput limits, but there were also a variety of internal enhancements. I’d like to start this series with one of them.

VAAI (VMware API for Array Integration) includes a variety of offloads that allow the underlying array to do certain storage-related tasks better (either faster, more efficiently, etc.) than ESXi can do them. One of these offloads is called Block Zero, which leverages the SCSI command called WRITE SAME. WRITE SAME is basically a SCSI operation that tells the storage to write a certain pattern, in this case zeros. So instead of ESXi issuing possibly terabytes of zeros, ESXi just issues a few hundred or thousand small WRITE SAME I/Os and the array takes care of the zeroing. This greatly speeds up the process and also significantly reduces the impact on the SAN.

WRITE SAME is used in quite a few places, but the most commonly encountered scenarios are:

Pure Storage, UNMAP, VMware

What’s New in Core Storage in vSphere 6.7 Part V: Rate Control for Automatic VMFS UNMAP

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vSphere 6.7 core storage “what’s new” series:

VMware has continued to improve and refine automatic UNMAP in vSphere 6.7. In vSphere 6.5, VMFS-6 introduced automatic space reclamation, so that you no longer had to run UNMAP manually to reclaim space after virtual disks or VMs had been deleted.

Continue reading What’s New in Core Storage in vSphere 6.7 Part V: Rate Control for Automatic VMFS UNMAP →

NVMe, VMware

What’s New in Core Storage in vSphere 6.7 Part IV: NVMe Controller In-Guest UNMAP Support

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vSphere 6.7 core storage “what’s new” series:

Another feature added in vSphere 6.7 is support for a guest being able to issue UNMAP to a virtual disk when presented through the NVMe controller.

Continue reading What’s New in Core Storage in vSphere 6.7 Part IV: NVMe Controller In-Guest UNMAP Support →

FlashArray, PowerCLI, PowerShell, Pure Storage, Virtual Volumes, VMware

PowerCLI and VVols Part I: Assigning a SPBM Policy

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There are a variety of ways to assign and set a SPBM Policy to a VM. I recently put out a workflow package for vRO to everything VVols and Pure:

vRealize Orchestrator VVol Workflow Package

I also specifically blogged about assigning a policy to a VM with vRO:

Assigning a VVol VM Storage Policy with vRO

How do you do this with PowerCLI? Continue reading PowerCLI and VVols Part I: Assigning a SPBM Policy →

VMware

What’s New in Core Storage in vSphere 6.7 Part II: Sector Size and VMFS-6

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vSphere 6.7 core storage “what’s new” series:

In vSphere 6.5, a new version of VMFS was introduced–VMFS-6. A behavior that many noted was that it was not always the default option for their storage. ESXi (unless told otherwise) would default to formatting some storage with VMFS-5. So when you installed ESXi, the default datastore that gets created would be VMFS-5.

The issue with this was that VMFS-5, was well not VMFS-6. Not automatic UNMAP etc. Furthermore, there is no upgrade path besides deleting the file system and then reformatting with VMFS-6. This of course was a bit annoying for many.

Continue reading What’s New in Core Storage in vSphere 6.7 Part II: Sector Size and VMFS-6 →

ActiveCluster, FlashArray, Migration, Pure SRA, Pure Storage, Site Recovery Manager, VMware

Tech Preview: vCenter Site Recovery Manager with ActiveCluster

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An increasingly common use case for Active-Active replication in vSphere environments is vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) which I wrote about in this paper recently:

https://support.purestorage.com/Solutions/VMware_Platform_Guide/002ActiveCluster_with_VMware/PDF_Guide%3A_Implementing_vSphere_Metro_Storage_Cluster_With_ActiveCluster

This overviews how a stretched vSphere cluster interacts with the active-active replication we offer on the FlashArray called ActiveCluster. Continue reading Tech Preview: vCenter Site Recovery Manager with ActiveCluster →

Pure Storage, Virtual Volumes, VMware

VVol VMUG Webinar Q&A Follow Up

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I recently did a VMUG webcast on VVols and there were a ton of questions and unfortunately I ran out of time and could not answer a lot of them. I felt bad about that, so I decided to follow up. I was going to send out emails to the people who asked, but figured it was simpler and more useful to others to just put them all here.

See the VMUG VVol webinar here:

https://www.gotostage.com/channel/13896d6cf6304fddab1a485982c915dc/recording/762f0dccfe1c4406a0e5b58fea449e80/watch

You can get my slides here.

Questions:

Would VVols replace the requirements for RDM’s?

Answer:  Maybe. It depends on why you are using RDMs. If it is simply to allow sharing or overwriting between physical and virtual. VVols will replace RDMs. If it is to make it easier to restore from array snapshots, VVols will replace them. If it is for Microsoft Failover Clustering, VVols are not supported with that yet. You still need RDMs. Though VMware is supposed to be adding support for this in the next release. See this post for more info. Continue reading VVol VMUG Webinar Q&A Follow Up →

Virtual Volumes

Required vCenter Permissions for Registering a VVol VASA Provider

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I’ve had a few customers ask me what are the minimum vCenter permissions required to register a VVol VASA provider. The use case is, I want my storage admin to be able to do it, but I don’t want them to do anything else.

While this can be done in a very slick way with vRealize Automation (more on that in a later post), this can be done with standard vCenter permissions too. Continue reading Required vCenter Permissions for Registering a VVol VASA Provider →

Performance, VMware

What is the latency stat QAVG?

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I wrote a blog post a year or so ago about ESXi and storage queues which has received a lot of wonderful feedback (thank you!!) and I eventually turned it into a VMworld session and other engagements:

So in the past year I have had quite a few discussions around this. And one part has always bothered me a bit.

In ESXI, there are a variety of latency metrics:

  • GAVG. Guest average. Sometimes called “VM observed latency”. This is the amount of time it takes for an I/O to be completed, after it leaves the VM. So through ESXi, through the SAN (or iSCSI network) and committed to the array and acknowledged back.
  • KAVG. Kernel average. This is how long an I/O is spending in the ESXi kernel. If this is anything but zero, there is some kind of bottleneck (often a maxed out queue)
  • DAVG. This is how long it takes for the I/O to be sent from host, through the SAN and to the array and acknowledged back.

Continue reading What is the latency stat QAVG? →

FlashArray, Pure Storage, Replication, Virtual Volumes, VMware, vRealize Orchestrator

vRealize Orchestrator VVol Workflow Package

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Ok finally! I had this finished awhile ago, but I wrote it using our version 2.0 plugin–so I couldn’t post it until the plugin was certified by VMware. That plugin version is now certified and posted on the VMware Solution Exchange (see my post here).

Moving forward, we will likely be posting new workflows in various packages (working on an ActiveCluster one now), instead of including them directly in our plugin. This will make it easier to update them and add to them, without also having to generate an entire new plugin version.

So first, download and install the v2 FlashArray plugin for vRO and then install my workflow package for VVol on the VMware Solutions Exchange:

https://marketplace.vmware.com/vsx/solutions/flasharray-vvol-workflow-package-for-vro-1-0?ref=search 

Continue reading vRealize Orchestrator VVol Workflow Package →