"Remember kids, the only difference between Science and screwing around is writing it down" -Alex Jason (made popular by Adam Savage)
Not long ago I posted about our initial release of our vSphere Plugin that supports the HTML-5 UI–the main problem though is that it did not yet support the VVol stuff we put in the original flash/flex based plugin.
So accordingly, the most common question I received was “when are you adding VVol support to this one?”. And my response was “Soon! We are working on it”.
Continue reading “FlashArray HTML-5 vSphere Client Plugin VVol Support”Phew that title is a mouthful. Sorry about that. But at least you know what I’m gonna talk about here. Nothing particularly profound, but obviously something every customer must do. I’ve been on a solid PowerShell kick as of late so why not put pen to paper here.
So whether you are using VVols or VMFS (or gross: RDMs) you need to do a bit of prep work to get things up and running. I will likely write a post on doing this with the vSphere Client Plugin, but for now let’s focus on doing it with PowerShell.
So step one is to install the PowerShell module that will help you. This is hosted on the PowerShell Gallery, so it is fairly simple to install:
install-module PureStorage.FlashArray.VMware
If you already have it installed, don’t forget to pull the latest version:
update-module PureStorage.FlashArray.VMwareContinue reading “Configuring an ESXi cluster for storage provisioning for a FlashArray via PowerShell”
I recently saw a post on Reddit about pulling a VM storage policy from a VM using vRO and it was stated that it was not possible which was said to be confirmed by VMware support.
‘Now I don’t know when they asked VMware support, and if it was two years or so ago, then that was true. But it is certainly not true now. Though I will admit, it is not super intuitive to figure out unless you know where to look. Here is how you do it.
Continue reading “Retrieving Storage Policy of a VM with vRO”Btw, I only tested this with VVol storage policies, but it really should not matter at all.
A VVol datastore, is not a file system, so it is not a traditional datastore. It is just a capacity quota. So when you “mount” a VVol datastore, you aren’t really performing a traditional mounting operation as there is no underlying physical storage to address during the mount. So instead of mounting some storage device, you are mounting what is called a storage container. This is the meta data object that represents the certain amount of capacity that can be provisioned from a given array. An array can have more than one storage containers, for reasons of multi-tenancy or whatever.
In a VMFS world, when you go to create a new datastore, you pass it the serial number of the storage you want to format with VMFS. You know that serial, because, well, you created the storage device. When you “mount” a VVol datastore, instead of a device serial, you supply the storage container UUID. It comes in the form of vvol:e0ad83893ead3681-b1b7f56a45ff64f1. Of course the characters will vary a bit.
Continue reading “Generating the default VVol Storage Container ID”I’ve been making a lot of updates to my PowerShell module around VVols recently and this was the last “table stakes” cmdlet I wanted to add. There are certainly more to come, but now we definitely have the basics. In 1.2.2.1 release of the PowerShell module I added a cmdlet called Mount-PfaVvolDatastore.
As of today we support a single VVol datastore–though we are working on adding support for more than one.
A common question I hear is “can I install the Pure vSphere Plugin via PowerShell?” and my answer has been up until now, “sorry no :(”
But I was asked it twice last week and I decided to actually think about it? Why couldn’t it be automated? Just because we host in in the FlashArray and it is normally installed via our GUI? That GUI has to be executing code to do the install.
Installing a vSphere plugin is really two steps. First registering the plugin as an extension (this says what the plugin is, what version, etc). And then actually installing the plugin files to the vCenter. In a normal situation, someone logs into our GUI, connect to the vCenter and then runs the “install” which is really just registering the extension. In that registered extension, there is a link to where the plugin files can be downloaded from. This is step 2. At some point after registration, the vSphere Client downloads the files. In the Flash version, it happened the next time you logged in (this is why logging in took so long the first time you logged in after installing plugin). In the HTML-5 vSphere Client, this happens in the background, so there is no delay in logging in.
Continue reading “Installing the Pure Storage vSphere Plugin with PowerShell”Registering VASA providers is the first step in setting up VVols for a given vCenter, so automating this process is something that might be of interest to folks. We currently have this process in our vSphere Plugin, as well as in our vRO plugin, and of course you can do it manually. What about PowerShell? Well we have that too!
In our PowerShell Pure/VMware module there are three new cmdlets:
Finally! I know… You have been waiting for this and so have I. Our first release of our vSphere Web Client Plugin that supports the HTML-5 interface is officially released. Let’s walk through what it looks like!
The HTML-5 interface is vastly superior to the flash/flex based one, not only due to more accurate readouts, faster load times, but also the extensibility of the interface and guidelines around integration. Making it a much better platform for integration as compared to prior interfaces for vSphere.
Continue reading “The Pure Storage Plugin for the HTML-5 vSphere Client”I have written about authenticating with the Pure1 REST API, and my PowerShell module in the past:
https://www.codyhosterman.com/2019/01/using-the-pure1-rest-api-part-i-powershell/
NOTE: This workaround is not really needed anymore with the default behavior of the module. See this post: https://www.codyhosterman.com/2019/12/pure1-rest-api-authentication-made-easy/
One of the issues is that if you followed my default instructions, you would need to run the PowerShell window as an admin to be able to create the connection. The answer–now that I think about it is fairly obvious: non-admin users (or admins not running in admin mode) don’t have security rights to it. Duh!
One of the major advantages we have seen with VVols is making a virtual disk a first class citizen on the array. We can restore, copy, replicate them (and their VMs) as storage objects were meant to be restored, copied, replicated etc.
Though one thing about virtual disks is that by default–they are not first class citizens in vSphere, VVols or otherwise. To create one, it has to be associated with a VM.
To retrieve one in PowerCLI (for example) get-harddisk requires a datastore or a VM to return a result:
Same if I want to create a new one:
