Author: codyhosterman

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Introducing the Pure1 REST API

Hello there! The FlashArray and FlashBlade products from Pure have always had a REST API service built in–this REST service allows you to manage, provision, and pull raw statistics from the array.

But there are two pieces missing:

  1. You need to iterate through each array if you want to intelligently place a volume on it (or find a volume or whatever)
  2. They only offer raw statistics–you need to do some crunching possibly to get what you want. Create projections and forecast, find how busy an array is, etc.

Luckily this is what Pure1 does for you. Every customer has access to our Pure1 web tool. This is something we host, all of your dial-home information gets fed into it. We use that information to figure out how “busy” an array is, when it will fill up from a capacity or performance perspective and much more. We now offer a REST API for Pure1 as well, so you can do some one-stop shopping for the information you need, that the arrays cannot natively provide.

Continue reading “Introducing the Pure1 REST API”
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It’s 2019! Year in Review and A Few Twitter Recommendations

Happy New Year!! I don’t plan on this being a long post, but as I type this I think “Well I don’t really even have a plan on what this post will be”. So I take that back–this post will be of an indeterminate length.

2018 was an interesting year–for better or for worse I suppose. Let’s put politics and world affairs aside for now. Not enough time in the day for that.

2018 was great year for me personally, I got married, enjoyed a lot of backpacking, camping, and traveling with my wife. Had more than a few Ballast Point Sculpins. Played the heck out of Zelda Breathe of the Wild.

Continue reading “It’s 2019! Year in Review and A Few Twitter Recommendations”
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Updating a volume group name on the FlashArray for VVols

The FlashArray implementation of Virtual Volumes surfaces VMs on the FlashArray as standard volume groups. The volume group being named by the virtual machine name. Each VVol is then added and removed to the volume group as they are provisioned or deleted. These objects though are fairly flexible–we do not use the volume group as a unique identifier of the virtual machine–internally we use key/value tags for that.

The benefit of that design is that you can delete the volume groups, rename them, or add and remove other volumes to it. Giving you some flexibility to group related VMs or whatever your use case might be to move things around, without breaking our VVol implementation.

Continue reading “Updating a volume group name on the FlashArray for VVols”
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PowerCLI and VVols Part VI: Running a Test Failover

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 to manually write is fairly minimal.

Continue reading “PowerCLI and VVols Part VI: Running a Test Failover”
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Announcing: Pure Storage Cloud Block Store for AWS

One of the fundamental features of the operating environment running on the FlashArray™ is the fact that the same software can run on many different hardware implementation of the FlashArray. This is one of the reasons that we can offer hardware Non-Disruptive Upgrades or when we introduce new features (even things as expansive as VVols) we can support it on older hardware. We support VVols going back to the FA 420-an array that was introduced before I joined Pure Storage® 4.5 years ago.

Furthermore, we have been having increasing conversations around the public cloud. Not just running applications in it, but moving data to and from it. DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) is an increasingly talked about use case. VMware Cloud in AWS is getting more and more attention at VMworld, and in general. We, at Pure get it. Will everything go to public cloud? No. Certainly not. Will everything stay on-premises? Also, of course not. Some customers will. Some will not at all. Many (most?) will use both in some capacity. So enabling data mobility is important.

Continue reading “Announcing: Pure Storage Cloud Block Store for AWS”

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Top vBlog Voting 2018

It is that time of year again! Top vBlog voting! I would like to thank everyone who voted for me last year–I was absolutely humbled by all of the votes I received–so thank you.

Of course thanks to Eric Siebert at vsphere-land.com for running this year after year–this voting process is no simple task. To vote go here:

http://vsphere-land.com/news/voting-now-open-for-top-vblog-2018.html 

A quick note on this blog… Continue reading “Top vBlog Voting 2018”

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1.1.0.2 Release of the Pure Storage VMware PowerShell Module

I have released a new version of the VMware/Pure PowerShell module which can be automatically installed from the PowerShell Gallery.

Pure Storage PowerShell VMware Module

Updates in this release are focused on VVols. Creating VVol snapshots, copying them, creating new disks from them, retrieving them etc.

Version 1.1.0.2

I wrote a blog post below on using some of the new cmdlets:

PowerCLI and VVols Part V: Array Snapshots and VVols

Continue reading “1.1.0.2 Release of the Pure Storage VMware PowerShell Module”

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PowerCLI and VVols Part V: Array Snapshots and VVols

Another post in my series on VVols and PowerCLI, for previous posts see these:

This post will be about managing one-off snapshots with VVols on the FlashArray with PowerCLI.

One of the still semi-valid reasons I have seen DBAs say “I dont want to virtualize because…” Is that they have simple snapshot/recovery scripts for their physical server that allows them to quickly restore DBs from snapshots. Doing this on VMFS requires A LOT of coordination with the VMware layer.

So they tell the VMware team–“okay I will virtualize but I want RDMs”. Well the VMware team says “well we’d rather die”

…and around in circles we go…

VVols provides the ability to provide this benefit (easy snapshot stuff) but still get the benefits of VMware stuff (vMotion, Storage vMotion, cloning, etc) without the downside of RDMs.

So let’s walk though that process.

Continue reading “PowerCLI and VVols Part V: Array Snapshots and VVols”
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Latency-based PSP in ESXi 6.7 Update 1: A test drive

Yesterday, I wrote a post introducing the new latency-based round robin multipathing policy in ESXi 6.7 Update 1. You can check that out here:

Latency Round Robin PSP in ESXi 6.7 Update 1

In normal scenarios, you may not see much of a performance difference between the standard IOPS switching-based policy and the latency one. So don’t necessarily expect that switching policies will change anything. But then again, multipathing primarily exists not for healthy states, but instead exists to protect during times of poor health. Continue reading “Latency-based PSP in ESXi 6.7 Update 1: A test drive”

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Latency Round Robin PSP in ESXi 6.7 Update 1

This is my first (but certainly not last post) on the new path selection policy option in vSphere 6.7 Update 1. In reality, this option was introduced in the initial release of 6.7, but it was not officially supported until update 1.

So what is it? Well first off, see the official words from my colleague Jason Massae at VMware here:

https://storagehub.vmware.com/t/vsphere-storage/vsphere-6-7-core-storage-1/vsphere-6-7-u1-enhanced-round-robin-load-balancing/

Why was this PSP option introduced? Well the most common path selection policy is the NMP Round Robin. This is VMware’s built-in path selection policy for arrays that offer multiple paths. Round Robin was a great way to leverage the full performance of your array by actively using all of the paths simultaneously. Well…almost simultaneously.

Continue reading “Latency Round Robin PSP in ESXi 6.7 Update 1”