"Remember kids, the only difference between Science and screwing around is writing it down" -Alex Jason (made popular by Adam Savage)
Quick update. I have posted a new version of the PowerCLI UNMAP script that I maintain. I usually do not put a blog post out every time I update it, but there were enough changes here I think it was worth a quick note.
Continue reading “Updated UNMAP PowerCLI Script for FlashArrays”
A question came up on our community about a Chrome extension called Advanced REST Client and I had never used it before, so I decided to check it out. Install it here. It will add an extension that allows you to make REST calls to, well whatever from your Chrome browser.
***UPDATE My coworker Barkz did an excellent post about this a few months back too, so check it out too***
Of course there are a billion ways to do this (I traditionally have just used Invoke-RestMethod in PowerShell) but this is another one for your tool arsenal . A quick and easy way to pull REST information from the FlashArray without having to learn another tool like PowerShell to do it.
Continue reading “Using the Chrome Advanced REST Client with the FlashArray”
One of the things in vSphere 6.0 that I really wanted to look at was the Instant Clone functionality that was included in the release. Instant Clone (AKA Project Fargo AKA VMFork) is the ability to essentially instantly create new virtual machines that are identical copies of a running parent VM by sharing the current memory and virtual disk files of that parent. The “forked” VMs are basically resumed copies of a stunned parent and the disk write/memory changes are committed down to delta VMDKs or delta memory pages while the children continue to read from any unchanged data in the parent VMDKs.
Plenty of other people have gone into more detail on this and the architecture, so instead of me re-writing all of this check out this post from Duncan Epping:
http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2014/10/07/project-fargo-aka-vmfork-what-is-it/
Or Google it.
Cool stuff. So I plan on doing a few different posts on this, tons of thoughts how this could be used, this first post though will focus on just simply setting it up. Continue reading “VMFork, InstantClone, Project Fargo Oh My! Part 1: Walkthrough”
Quick post here. I recently updated my environment to vCenter 6.0 Update 1 and VMware Site Recovery Manager 6.1 and after my first attempted test failover (and subsequent ones) the test would always fail when it tried to power on the virtual machines. Some powered-on and some didn’t. The following errors appeared for about half of my VMs:
Continue reading “VMware SRM and the PBM & PreCloneCheckCallback error”
I was working on rebuilding my VMware lab environment today and for simplicity’s sake decided to leverage two external Platform Services Controllers (PSC), one for each of my vCenter environments (I need two because I am setting up Site Recovery Manager) in a federated manner. Akin to the previous term of “linked mode” If you are not familiar with PSC which was added in vSphere 6.0, check out this KB. I went with the 3rd deployment model illustrated in this KB. Continue reading “Pure Storage vSphere Web Client Plugin and Multiple vCenters”
I have completed updates for two of my main VMware vSphere documents for the Pure Storage FlashArray. These include the standard best practices document and the white paper explaining VAAI in detail and how it works on the FlashArray.
The best practices document has mainly been updated with information that this blog has shown in the past couple of months. Notably:
In the VAAI document, it is a similar update:
Both documents are also updated for FlashArray//m, but it is mainly a cosmetic change as nothing really changes for the VMware environment, no recommendations are changed. Of course the documents are also cleaned up and re-arranged to be more reader friendly with a semi-new format as well.
Important! If you have old versions of these documents, delete them! These get updated frequently (a few times a year at least) and these changes can be important. When needing to refer to the guides, please check back to the Pure Storage community for the latest version.
Enjoy! As always feedback on these documents is ALWAYS welcome.
I recently was doing some troubleshooting for a customer that was using my UNMAP PowerCLI script and discovered a change in ESXi 5.5+ UNMAP. The issue was that the script was taking quite a while to complete. After some logic optimizations and increasing timeouts the script was sped up a bit and less timeout errors occurred, but a bunch of the UNMAP operations were still taking a lot longer than expected. Eventually we threw our hands up and said it was good enough. A bit more recently, I was testing a 3rd party UNMAP tool and ran into similar behavior so I dug into it a bit more and found some semi-unexpected changes in how UNMAP works, specifically the behavior when leveraging non-default block iteration counts. Continue reading “UNMAP Block Count Behavior Change in ESXi 5.5 P3+”
One of the few hard requirements we make to configure best practices on ESXi for the FlashArray is to create a SATP rule. A SATP rule simply describes a certain configuration (mainly around multipathing) for a specific set of devices (usually devices from an array). For the FlashArray, this rule consists of making sure devices are using Round Robin and an I/O operations limit of 1.
esxcli storage nmp satp rule add -s VMW_SATP_ALUA -V PURE -M FlashArray -P “VMW_PSP_RR” -O iops=1 -e “FlashArray SATP Rule”
I wanted to let people know about a fun contest we just started today at Pure Storage for our customers to get involved in that was the brainchild of my esteemed coworker Barkz. In our GUI (also visible when you login to the array CLI) there is a login banner you can create to greet you, or warn you as the case may be. The banner is just an ASCII text box, but we have had a few customers create some cool banners in the form of ASCII images.
In Part 1 of this two-parter, I spoke about our new CLI-based I/O Balance tool customers can use to verify that the I/O coming from their host is balanced across the paths that are configured.
We also have made some enhancements in the GUI for host connectivity reporting. There has been a screen inside the System tab of the FlashArray GUI that reports on the redundancy of host connections to the FlashArray for awhile now:
Continue reading “Host Connectivity Reporting Changes and IO Balance: Part 2”
