vSphere Plugin – Cody Hosterman

July 13, 2022

Pure Storage vSphere Remote Plugin™ 5.1.0 launch: vVol Point-in-Time Recovery

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.

February 17, 2022

vSphere Remote Plugin: .local vCenter Domains

Hello- Nelson Elam here! I’m a VMware Solutions Engineer at Pure Storage and wanted to make you aware of an issue we’ve seen crop up a couple of times recently with our vSphere Remote Plugin and provide a quick explanation.

If your vCenter uses a .local domain (vcenter.purestorage.local is one example), you might have seen the following 3 errors in Pure’s vSphere Remote Plugin in vCenter:

In the FlashArray list page, the error “Error retrieving array list. Please try again later.” is returned.
When trying to import arrays via Pure1, the error “Authenticate with Pure1 to use this feature” is returned despite previously successful registration with Pure1 through the plugin.
When adding an array manually, a “no permissions” error is returned.

Resolution:
To resolve this, follow step 14 from the Online Deployment Procedure for the remote plugin by running this command after customizing it to your environment:
[email protected]:~$ puredns setattr --search {your .local domain} --nameservers {ip or FQDN of DNS server}

So what’s going on here? When the OVA where you deployed the Remote vSphere Plugin tries to reach out to your vCenter with a .local domain suffix, it can’t resolve the DNS address unless you’ve provided the appropriate search domain for the OVA and will return different errors depending on where you are trying to interact with it in vCenter.

Luckily this is a simple fix despite the seemingly unrelated errors that pop up. Hopefully this was helpful!

January 8, 2021January 11, 2021

Pure Storage Plugin for the vSphere Client 4.5.0 Release

Howdy doody folks. Lots of releases coming down the pipe in short order and the latest is well the latest release of the Pure Storage Plugin for the vSphere Client. This may be our last release of it in this architecture (though we may have one or so more depending on things) in favor of the new preferred client-side architecture that VMware released in 6.7. Details on that here if you are curious.

Anyways, what’s new in this plugin?

The release notes are here:

https://support.purestorage.com/Solutions/VMware_Platform_Guide/Release_Notes_for_VMware_Solutions/Release_Notes%3A_Pure_Storage_Plugin_for_the_vSphere_Client#4.5.0_Release_Notes

But in short, five things:

Improved protection group import wizard. This feature pulls in FlashArray protection groups and converts them into vVol storage policies. This was, rudimentary at best previously, and is now a full-blown, much more flexible wizard.
Native performance charts. Previously performance charts for datastores (where we showed FlashArray performance stats in the vSphere Client) was actually an iframe we pulled from our GUI. This was a poor decision. We have re-done this entirely from the ground up and now pull the stats from the REST API and draw them natively using the Clarity UI. Furthermore, there are now way more stats shown too.
Datastore connectivity management. A few releases ago we added a feature to add an existing datastore to new compute, but it wasn’t particularly flexible and it wasn’t helpful if there were connectivity issues and didn’t provide good insight into what was already connected. We now have an entirely new page that focuses on this.
Host management. This has been entirely revamped. Initially host management was laser focused on one use case: connecting a cluster to a new FlashArray. But no ability to add/remove a host or make adjustments. And like above, no good insight into current configuration. The host and cluster objects now have their own page with extensive controls.
vVol Datastore Summary. This shows some basic information around the vVol datastore object

First off how do you install? The easiest method is PowerShell. See details (and other options) here:

https://support.purestorage.com/Solutions/VMware_Platform_Guide/User_Guides_for_VMware_Solutions/Using_the_Pure_Storage_Plugin_for_the_vSphere_Client/vSphere_Plugin_User_Guide%3A_Installing_the_vSphere_Plugin