Tag: PowerShell

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Unattended VMFS UNMAP Script

I updated my UNMAP PowerCLI script a month or so ago and improved quite a few things–but I did remove hard-coded variables and replaced it with interactive input. Which is fine for some, but for many it was not.

Note: Move to VMFS-6 in vSphere 6.5 and you don’t have to worry about this UNMAP business anymore 🙂

Essentially, quite a few people want to run it as a scheduled task in Windows, and if it requires input that just isn’t going to work out of the box. So I have created an unattended version of the script. For details read on.

Note: I will continue to update the script (bugs, features, etc.) but will note them on my other blog post about the script here:

Pure Storage FlashArray UNMAP PowerCLI Script for VMware ESXi

I will only update this post if the unattended version changes in a way that makes these instructions wrong. Continue reading “Unattended VMFS UNMAP Script”

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Protection Group Recovery in PowerShell

Awhile back I wrote about performing an operation introduced in Purity 4.6 called protection group copy, which I really referred to as protection group recovery, which I think is maybe a more apt title.

Anyways, this feature is available in our REST API and our CLI (not yet in our GUI in a direct format) but is not yet built into our PowerShell SDK.  I have seen more than one request for information on how to do this, and it certainly can be done without our official SDK and this is through the good ol’ Invoke-RestMethod cmdlet built into PowerShell. I’ve spoken about using this many times, here and here.

Let’s walk through it specifically with protection group restore.

Continue reading “Protection Group Recovery in PowerShell”

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Force the Invoke-RestMethod PowerShell cmdlet to use TLS 1.2

I wrote about some security changes in the FlashArray operating environment (called Purity) version 4.7 a month or so back. This was concerning the deprecation of SSL and TLS version 1.0, forcing all (management) connections to the FlashArray to use TLS 1.1 or 1.2 (read this here).

Our PowerShell SDK was enhanced so it would use the appropriate security connection type so users of that do not need to worry as long as they upgrade our SDK. But what about the few remaining functions that people might use that the PowerShell SDK doesn’t cover? As there are a few REST calls that are not built into the SDK (yet).  Continue reading “Force the Invoke-RestMethod PowerShell cmdlet to use TLS 1.2”

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Using PowerShell with the VMware Log Insight REST API

I have quite a few PowerShell scripts these days and I run a bunch of them quite often. All of my scripts log information to a file so I can see what happened but I decided I wanted to log them into something that could help me analyze or quickly review the data. Something better than looking at a bunch of text files. One of my favorite products, VMware Log Insight was the first thing I thought of. The ingestion REST API makes the most sense. Took a little time to figure out the best way to do it, but it’s working great now. To the details!

Continue reading “Using PowerShell with the VMware Log Insight REST API”

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Semi-transparent failover with VMFS and Active/Passive Replication

So in a blog series that I started a few weeks back (still working on finishing it), I wrote about managing snapshots and resignaturing of VMFS volumes. One of the posts was dedicated to why I would choose resignaturing over force mounting almost all of the time.

An obvious question after that post is, well when would I want to force mount? There is a situation where i think it is a decent option. A failover situation where the recovery site is the same site as the production site, in terms of compute/vCenter. The storage is what fails over to another array. This is a situation I see increasingly common as network pipes are getting bigger.

Continue reading “Semi-transparent failover with VMFS and Active/Passive Replication”

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FlashArray UNMAP Script with the Pure Storage PowerShell SDK and PowerActions

I have officially decided to “retire” my UNMAP script that uses direct REST calls to find before and after capacity changes for given volumes. I am only updating the one that uses the Pure Storage PowerShell SDK from this point on–using this is much more robust, not tied to direct API versions and greatly simplifies managing the data in the script.clip_image006

I have also created a second version for use in the VMware Fling called PowerActions. This allows the script to be executed from the vSphere Web Client.

Continue reading “FlashArray UNMAP Script with the Pure Storage PowerShell SDK and PowerActions”

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Querying SRM for Protected VMs with PowerCLI

I was recently asked how to query SRM for protected VMs and I decided it would make a good quick blog post. There is a great post here on using PowerCLI with SRM, but it doesn’t show the information to return per virtual machine information by default. Needs a bit more.

All it returns is a SRM-based virtual machine ID which doesn’t relate to what a user is probably looking for (a virtual machine name). So it needs a few more simple steps. The following script which can be found on my GitHub page here that does the following things:

  1. Connects to a vCenter
  2. Connects to SRM
  3. Creates a log folder with a time stamp in the name
  4. Iterates through each Protection Group
  5. Logs every virtual machine in that protection group

Continue reading “Querying SRM for Protected VMs with PowerCLI”