"Remember kids, the only difference between Science and screwing around is writing it down" -Alex Jason (made popular by Adam Savage)
Quick shameless plug post. The top vBlog voting for 2016 is out!
http://vsphere-land.com/news/voting-now-open-for-top-vblog-2016.html
My blog is listed for a candidate for top blog and top storage-related blog. If my blog has helped you out and/or you like it please vote for it! I really appreciate it, while I love blogging and will continue to regardless it is a lot of work to keep up and the recognition is greatly appreciated! Keeps me motivated 🙂
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I wrote a post recently on the updates made to the PowerCLI 6.3 R1 esxcli implementation, so the logical next step was to implement this new behavior into my PowerCLI scripts that use esxcli. I still have a few scripts to update, but my two best practice-related scripts are ready to go. The two scripts are:
While I was updating them for esxcli changes, I figured i might as well improve them too, so there are quite a few changes for both. Let’s take a look.
Continue reading “FlashArray VMware Best Practices PowerCLI Scripts”
One of the changes in VMware vSphere PowerCLI 6.3 R1 was a much needed one: how the arguments are managed with esxcli commands. This was always a bit of a pain, especially for commands that have a lot of arguments. I won’t go into the detail on all of why/what of the changes here, as Alan Renouf already did that quite well here. So if you are unsure of the previous ugliness of esxcli in PowerCLI read that post before reading more here. Otherwise, continue on. I want to talk about some specific examples for storage-related commands that I use and many of our customers use quite commonly.
In the recent release of the Purity Operating Environment on the FlashArray we deprecated TLS 1.0 support due to the ever growing list of vulnerabilities in it. Communication will be restricted to TLS 1.1 and later. Unfortunately, this affects some plugins/integrations. This is not an exhaustive list, but related to the ones VMware customers probably touch the most. If something is not listed ping the relevant support organization for more information.
The following plugins are NOT affected and will continue to work with Purity 4.7:
The following are affected and will need to be upgraded to a specific version to work with Purity 4.7:
Continue reading “FlashArray Deprecation of TLS 1.0 Support and the vSphere Web Client Plugin”
This is part 5 of this 7 part series. Questions around managing VMFS snapshots have been cropping up a lot lately and I realized I didn’t have a lot of specific Pure Storage and VMware resignaturing information out there. Especially around scripting all of this and the various options to do this. So I put a long series out here about how to do all of this.
The series being:
Just a quick tip here, I’ve noticed a fair amount of people do not know what happens when we restore a volume concerning the special “hidden” operation we take in case you make a mistake. So I thought it worth a quick post.
Continue reading “Automatic protection during a FlashArray Snapshot Restore”
In Purity 4.6 a new CLI and REST API function has been released called protection group recovery. This feature allows you to take a protection group that has replicated snapshots and quickly provision its data to a host or cluster for DR or test/dev purposes or whatever.
A continuation of my 4.6 overview post.
Continue reading “Using CLI and REST API to perform a FlashArray Protection Group Recovery”
It has been awhile since I have done a solely Purity operating environment post and with the recent release of our Purity 4.6 operating environment I thought it was a good opportunity to do one. I will overview some new features and changes, some big some small.
4.6 has been in Directed Availability (DA) for some time, so many of you might already have this, but I decided to wait until it was closer to GA (this is imminent) to post. Not a gigantic release, but I think there is some cool stuff in it regardless.
Here is a brief listing of some of the new stuff:
NEW FEATURES
Continue reading “Introducing FlashArray Purity Release 4.6”
I want to say this is the culmination of my last almost two years of creating vRealize integration for Pure Storage, but that isn’t the right word. It is a milestone, because there is still so much more cool stuff to be done. Especially with vRealize Automation. In many ways it is just the beginning! But I can now demonstrate Pure Storage FlashArray integration with the whole vRealize stack: Log Insight, Operations, Orchestrator and Automation.
Log Insight has a Content Pack. Operations has the Management Pack. Orchestrator has the Workflow Package. Automation also uses that Workflow Package. Let’s talk about how.
As you might be aware, there have been a few storage-related issues with ESXi 6.0 as of late:
Accidental PDL during dropped paths:
Storage PDL responses may not trigger path failover in vSphere 6.0 (2144657)
Host issues during smartd inquiries:
Issuing a 0x85 SCSI Command from a VMware ESXi 6.0 host results in a PDL error (2133286)
The question that comes up for the Pure Storage FlashArray is are we susceptible? The short answer is no. Let’s explain why. Continue reading “Recent ESXi 6 Storage Bugs and the FlashArray”