Tag: SPBM

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Managing vVol Storage Policies with PowerShell

I just posted about some new cmdlets here:

New vVol Replication PowerShell Cmdlets

Also in that release are a few more cmdlets concerning storage policy creation, editing, and assignment. They were built to make the process easier–the original cmdlets and their use is certainly an option–and for very specific things you might want to do they might be necessary, but the vast majority of common operations can be more easily achieved with these.

As always, to install run:

Install-Module PureStorage.FlashArray.VMware

Or to upgrade:

Update-Module PureStorage.FlashArray.VMware

These modules are open source, so if you just want to use my code or open an RFE or issue go here:

https://github.com/PureStorage-OpenConnect/PureStorage.FlashArray.VMware/

For detailed help on a cmdlet, run Get-Help

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New vVol Replication PowerShell Cmdlets

Happy New Year everyone! Let’s work to make 2021 a better year.

In furtherance of that goal, I have put out a few new vVol-related PowerShell cmdlets! So baby steps I guess.

The following are the new cmdlets:

Basics:

  • Get-PfaVvolStorageArray

Replication:

  • Get-PfaVvolReplicationGroup
  • Get-PfaVvolReplicationGroupPartner
  • Get-PfaVvolFaultDomain

Storage Policy Management:

  • Build-PfaVvolStoragePolicyConfig
  • Edit-PfaVvolStoragePolicy
  • Get-PfaVvolStoragePolicy
  • New-PfaVvolStoragePolicy
  • Set-PfaVvolVmStoragePolicy

Now to walk through how to use them. This post will talk about the basics and the replication cmdlets. The next post will talk about the profile cmdlets.

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Cloud Native Storage Part 1: Storage Policy Configuration

Previous series on Tanzu setup:

  1. Tanzu Kubernetes 1.2 Part 1: Deploying a Tanzu Kubernetes Management Cluster
  2. Tanzu Kubernetes 1.2 Part 2: Deploying a Tanzu Kubernetes Guest Cluster
  3. Tanzu Kubernetes 1.2 Part 3: Authenticating Tanzu Kubernetes Guest Clusters with Kubectl

The next step here is storage. I want to configure an ability to provision persistent storage in Tanzu Kubernetes. Storage is generally managed and configured through a specification called the Container Storage Interface (CSI). CSI is a specification created to provide a consistent experience in an orchestrated container environment for storage provisioning and management. There are a ton of different storage types (SAN, NAS, DAS, SDS, Cloud, etc. etc.) from 100x that in vendors. Management and interaction with all of them is different. Many people deploying and managing containers are not experts in any of these, and do not have the time nor the interest in learning them. And if you change storage vendors do you want to have to change your entire practice in k8s for it? Probably not.

So CSI takes some proprietary storage layer and provides an API mapping:

https://github.com/container-storage-interface/spec/blob/master/spec.md

Vendors can take that and build a CSI driver that manages their storage but provides a consistent experience above it.

At Pure Storage we have our own CSI driver for instance, called Pure Service Orchestrator. Which I will get to in a later series. For now, lets get into VMware’s CSI driver. VMware’s CSI driver is part of a whole offering called Cloud Native Storage.

https://github.com/kubernetes/cloud-provider-vsphere/blob/master/docs/book/tutorials/kubernetes-on-vsphere-with-kubeadm.md

https://blogs.vmware.com/virtualblocks/2019/08/14/introducing-cloud-native-storage-for-vsphere/

This has two parts, the CSI driver which gets installed in the k8s nodes, and the CNS control plane within vSphere itself that does the selecting and provisioning of storage. This requires vSphere 6.7 U3 or later. A benefit of using TKG is that the various CNS components come pre-installed.

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Retrieving Storage Policy of a VM with vRO

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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PowerCLI and VVols Part VII: Synchronizing a Replication Group

In this post, I will overview how to synchronize a VVol-based replication group with PowerCLI. See previous posts below for more context:

This post is somewhat specific to Pure Storage–the cmdlets of course are universal, but behaviors may not correlate to your storage array. So if you are using VVols on a non-Pure array, certainly consult your vendor.

Furthermore, this is certainly specific to PowerCLI when it comes to the commands. With that being said, the fundamentals on how this works with Pure is common for all orchestration tools, so you should be able to use this information for other tools. Though of course the cmds/syntax will be different.

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PowerCLI and VVols Part I: Assigning a SPBM Policy

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?

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