Category Archives: VMware

plugin, Pure Storage, VMware, vRealize Orchestrator

Installing the Pure Storage vSphere Plugin with vRealize Orchestrator

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A few months back I published a new PowerShell cmdlet for installing the Pure Storage vSphere Client Plugin. Get-PfavSpherePlugin and Install-PfavSpherePlugin. This works quite well and we’ve had a fair amount of use of it so far, but another place we are certainly investing in right now is vRealize Orchestrator and continuing to enhance our plugin. Filling in any gaps around workflows and actions, especially on initializing an environment is important.

One of those gaps was installing the vSphere Plugin. One common use case we have seen around vRO is day 0 config, but day 2 stuff is done in vCenter (deploying VMs, datastores, etc). So the vSphere Plugin comes in handy here. So how do I install it from vRO?

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VMware

Demystifying IO Operation Readouts in ESXi

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This doesn’t come up very often these days, but every once and awhile it does and every time it does, I look to see if we have documentation on it and there never seems to be. After writing this post I did find a forum post where my friend Drew answers it there too. Well anyways let’s quickly explain the situation.

Most block vendors these days tell customers to change their path switching policy for their storage in ESXi from the default of Round Robin (1,000) to 1. This makes ESXi switches logical paths for a given device after every I/O instead of every 1,000. The reason I say this doesn’t come up much anymore is that in modern version of ESXi (6.0 express patch+, 6.5 U1+ and 6.7+) we (Pure) have rules in ESXi that makes sure this is set by default without any user configuration. Many other vendors do as well.

Anyways, when using VMware tools to see if a device is configured properly, depending on how it is set, it can readout differently.

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plugin, Pure Storage, Virtual Volumes, VMware, vSphere

FlashArray HTML-5 vSphere Client Plugin VVol Support

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Not long ago I posted about our initial release of our vSphere Plugin that supports the HTML-5 UI–the main problem though is that it did not yet support the VVol stuff we put in the original flash/flex based plugin.

So accordingly, the most common question I received was “when are you adding VVol support to this one?”. And my response was “Soon! We are working on it”.

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Virtual Volumes, VMware, vRealize Orchestrator

Retrieving Storage Policy of a VM with vRO

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I recently saw a post on Reddit about pulling a VM storage policy from a VM using vRO and it was stated that it was not possible which was said to be confirmed by VMware support.

‘Now I don’t know when they asked VMware support, and if it was two years or so ago, then that was true. But it is certainly not true now. Though I will admit, it is not super intuitive to figure out unless you know where to look. Here is how you do it.

Btw, I only tested this with VVol storage policies, but it really should not matter at all.

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Pure Storage, Virtual Volumes, VMware

Generating the default VVol Storage Container ID

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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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PowerCLI, PowerShell, Virtual Volumes, VMware

Mounting a VVol Datastore with PowerCLI

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I’ve been making a lot of updates to my PowerShell module around VVols recently and this was the last “table stakes” cmdlet I wanted to add. There are certainly more to come, but now we definitely have the basics. In 1.2.2.1 release of the PowerShell module I added a cmdlet called Mount-PfaVvolDatastore.

As of today we support a single VVol datastore–though we are working on adding support for more than one.

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PowerCLI, Pure Storage, Virtual Volumes, VMware

Registering VASA with PowerShell

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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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Pure Storage, Virtual Volumes, VMware

First Class Disks and VVols

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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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FlashArray, PowerCLI, PowerShell, VMware

Revamped PowerShell Module for Pure and VMware

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About 6 months ago, my esteemed colleague Barkz blogged about our path forward with PowerShell. We have an official PowerShell SDK for managing the FlashArray–but it is limited to that: doing stuff to the FlashArray.

So to add value and make managing it within context of the layers you actually manage your infrastructure from (VMware, Microsoft, etc.) we created some value-add PowerShell modules to make it easier. Barkz talks about them here:

One Pure Storage PowerShell Module to Rule Them All.
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FlashArray, Pure Storage, pure1, VMware, vRealize Orchestrator

Pure Storage Plugin v3 for vRealize Orchestrator

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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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