Author: codyhosterman

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Pure Storage Python Toolkit Intro with Windows

Most of my scripting work here at Pure Storage has mostly been via PowerShell or at times Javascript (for like vRO). But I think it is time to get back into Python especially because of the VMware support for it now.

Pure Storage has an automation toolkit that helps get you started managing the FlashArray so you don’t have to deal with the direct REST work in your Python scripts. You can find information about that here:

http://pythonhosted.org/purestorage/index.html

Continue reading “Pure Storage Python Toolkit Intro with Windows”

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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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VAAI XCOPY not being used with Powered-On Windows VM

This is an issue I discovered along with my good friend and former colleague Drew Tonnesen a few years back which has cropped up a few times in recent days. I noticed there wasn’t really any information about it online, so made sense to put a quick post together.

In short, Windows 2012 R2 virtual machine clone or Storage vMotion operations complete much slower when powered-on as compared to when power-off. The common explanation is that VAAI XCOPY does not work when the VM is powered-on. This is not exactly true. Let me explain. Continue reading “VAAI XCOPY not being used with Powered-On Windows VM”

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FlashArray Host Group Creation PowerShell Script for VMware Clusters

New script to automatically create hosts groups on FlashArrays based on VMware ESXi clusters. This is a script I’ve had out for awhile but only recently revisited and realized it was way out of date and frankly, not very good. So I trashed most of it and re-wrote it. You can find it here:

https://github.com/codyhosterman/powercli/blob/master/createhostgroups.ps1

It is pretty self-explanatory I suppose, but it’s good to review the finer points before you run it. Continue reading “FlashArray Host Group Creation PowerShell Script for VMware Clusters”

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SRM Cannot Identify Replicated Datastores on iSCSI Devices

So we ran into a customer issue recently with VMware Site Recovery Manager that I have not seen before and have not found any on-point articles on, so I thought I’d share this one. Was an insidious one too, when troubleshooting this one I could not find the issue, eventually one of our rockstar escalation engineers at Pure (Jacob Hopkinson) figured it out after going through SRM debug logs line by line. Comes down to case sensitivity in iSCSI IQNs. I’ll explain…

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Pure Storage vRealize Orchestrator Workflow Package v1.2

I just released the 1.2 version of the Pure Storage FlashArray Workflow Package for vRealize Orchestrator. Like always, you can get this from GitHub:

https://github.com/codyhosterman/orchestrator/

If you haven’t looked at our vRO workflow package, check out my original post here:

FlashArray Workflow Package for vRealize Orchestrator

While this isn’t a huge release in terms of new features, I think it is an important one because it adds (among others) one particularly important workflow. Translating a VMFS datastore object into a FlashArray volume name. Let’s take a look.

Continue reading “Pure Storage vRealize Orchestrator Workflow Package v1.2”

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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”