"Remember kids, the only difference between Science and screwing around is writing it down" -Alex Jason (made popular by Adam Savage)
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 …
Continue reading “PowerCLI and VVols Part VI: Running a Test Failover”
Another post in my series on VVols and PowerCLI, for previous posts see these: PowerCLI and VVols Part I: Assigning a SPBM Policy PowerCLI and VVols Part II: Finding VVol UUIDs PowerCLI and VVols Part III: Getting VVol UUIDs from the FlashArray PowerCLI and VVols Part IV: Correlating a Windows NTFS to a VMDK PowerCLI …
Continue reading “PowerCLI and VVols Part V: Array Snapshots and VVols”
My last post in this series was about getting a VVol UUID and figuring out what volume on a FlashArray it is. But what about the step before that? If I have a guest OS file system how do I even figure out what VMDK it is? There is a basic option, which can potentially …
Continue reading “PowerCLI and VVols Part IV: Correlating a Windows NTFS to a VMDK”
The next step if you want to do correlation between a VMware VVol VMDK pointer and its corresponding FlashArray volume using PowerCLI. As a review, here are the previous posts in this series: PowerCLI and VVols Part I: Assigning a SPBM Policy PowerCLI and VVols Part II: Finding VVol UUIDs PowerCLI and VVols Part III: …
Continue reading “PowerCLI and VVols Part III: Getting VVol UUIDs from the FlashArray”
One of the great benefits of vVols is that fact that virtual disks are just volumes on your array. So this means if you want to do some data management with your virtual disks, you just need to work directly on the volume that corresponds to it. The question is what virtual disk corresponds to …
Continue reading “PowerCLI and vVols Part II: Finding vVol UUIDs”
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 …
Continue reading “PowerCLI and VVols Part I: Assigning a SPBM Policy”
Storage capacity reporting seems like a pretty straight forward topic. How much storage am I using? But when you introduce the concept of multiple levels of thin provisioning AND data reduction into it, all usage is not equal (does it compress well? does it dedupe well? is it zeroes?). This multi-part series will break it …
Continue reading “VMware Capacity Reporting Part V: VVols and UNMAP”
A few week ago I had the chance to stop by VMware HQ and catch up with some good friends at VMware. The highlight of the visit was doing an episode of the vSpeaking Podcast alongside VMware VVol engineering manager Patrick Dirks hosted by Pete Flecha and John Nicholson. Honored to be on the podcast …
Over the past few weeks, I have been working on writing a vRealize Orchestrator workflow package for Virtual Volumes and the FlashArray. While that is not quite ready to go out, I think some basics for starting to use vRO and VVols are worth noting. There are three main parts of using VVols with vRO: …
Continue reading “Getting Started with vRealize Orchestrator and VVols”
Ah, VVols. The VMFS Datastore killer. And very soon, the RDM killer. Virtual Volumes (VVols) is a spec from VMware that allows storage vendors implement virtual disks as they see fit. On FlashArray, we’ve implemented VVols virtual disks as just regular volumes on the array. Think about what that means for a second. It means …
Continue reading “VVols: A Whole New World for SQL Server Virtualization”