Pure Storage’s vROps Management Pack ™ 3.2.0 – New Features and Changes

Pure Storage recently launched a new management pack for vROps that had a number of important fixes and some changes to the interface. You can download it here and find the full release notes here. What’s new?

  • Interface changes
    • Updated icons
    • Restructuring of Pure Storage objects in the Object view of vROps
  • Add Offload Snapshot capacity metric
  • Add FlashArray Software™ version property

Let’s go over the interface changes first. If you navigate to Environment -> Object Browser -> Pure Storage FlashArray -> FlashArray Resources -> PureStorage World and expand an array, the layout will look quite different than what was there before. For starters, the icons have almost all been updated to mirror what you would expect to see on a modern FlashArray Purity version (or vCenter if that is a vCenter object). We made this change to make the vROps management pack experience as close to the FlashArray experience as possible.

Additionally, we moved the structure of the objects around to be more consistent with what you’d expect from the FlashArray. No objects were removed and the same object can be listed in multiple places where it makes sense (for example, if you expand a Hosts group, you will see the pertinent volumes there as well as under the Volumes group).

Next, we’ve added the Offload Snapshot capacity metric in this version as well as a FlashArray Offload Target object. The Offload Target object is visible under Protection and you can see the current space used by that Offload Target in the badge for that object; additionally, there is a Capacity metric for this object that shows historical consumption.

Lastly, you can now retrieve the Purity version of the array directly from vROps to help plan your FlashArrays’ upgrades. This information is found by selecting a FlashArray and going to Metrics -> Properties -> Details -> Purity Version.

What’s new in Pure’s vROps Management Pack 3.1.1 – vVol VM Metrics

Hello- my name is Nelson Elam and I’m a Solutions Engineer at Pure Storage. I am guest writing this blog for use on Cody’s website. I work on Pure’s vROps Management Pack.

With the introduction of Pure’s version 3.1.1 Management Pack for vROps, we now have the ability to monitor vVol VMs and datastores. We’ve updated the user guide here with the new vVol content but I thought it would be nice to cover some of this on this blog as well.

The big feature to come in 3.1.1 is the ability to monitor your Pure-hosted vVol VMs and the volumes backing them. To see some examples of this after installing 3.1.1, first you’ll want to click on the Environment tab then click on FlashArray Resources on the left hand side:


Next expand PureStorage World, the array your Pure-hosted vVol VM is on, then your VM name, and finally expand the volume group (suffix of -vg unless someone has changed it on your array) to see the volumes backing that VM. There are other ways to navigate to the same objects from this list but I find this way to be the most intuitive.

For my example, I’m going to focus on the only data volume connected to this VM because that will be more interesting to me from a performance perspective. This volume is where the OS for this VM lives.

Looking at our VM, I’ve focused on Average IOPS and Average Latency (ms). Using the default view, we can see that on April 29th, we had a spike in average IOPS to 5224; this was when I powered on this VM. Otherwise, IOPS are really low on average. Looking at latency on this volume, we can see it peaks at .82 ms and generally stays below .5 ms.

There are many other metrics available to us on these vVol volumes, but you might recognize them because they are the same as any other volume on a Pure Storage FlashArray!

Thank you for taking the time to read this- I hope you found it helpful.

Updated FlashArray Management Pack for VMware vRealize Operations

Quick post here. An updated version of the Pure Storage FlashArray Management Pack for VMware vRealize Operations (vROPs) has been posted to the VMware Solutions Exchange. No new features, but a variety of internal improvements and bug fixes. Please download the latest version here:

https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/pure-storage-management-pack-for-vmware-vrealize-operations

I recommend updating your pak to this version.

Notable issues fixed in build 1.0.126 (v1.0.1):

  • Use correct metric for top 25 volumes by read bandwidth widget.
  • Fix caching to allow relationships to be refreshed when “filter by vsphere” option is disabled.
  • Get datastores that are part of a datastore cluster in vCenter.
  • Minor UI string changes.

For a functional review, please check out this post here:

https://www.codyhosterman.com/2015/06/the-pure-storage-flasharray-vrops-adapter-v1/

The Pure Storage FlashArray vROPs Adapter v1

The Pure Storage Management Pack for VMware vRealize Operations Manager version 1 is now out! Download it here. This is the latest in our aggressive 2015 roadmap of VMware management integration, whether that be integration point that are new or updated.

vorpstitle

So first, what is a management pack? A management pack is a plugin of sorts that can be installed into vRealize Operations Manager (vROPs) that provides context and relationships to existing objects inside vROPs. How these objects are related depends on what the pack represents. In the case of Pure Storage, the pack relates VMware objects, such as VMs and datastore to volumes on a particular FlashArray. This in addition to FlashArray host groups and hosts. Continue reading “The Pure Storage FlashArray vROPs Adapter v1”