Category: FlashArray

Posted on

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”

Posted on

Pure Storage and VMware PowerShell Module

I see a fair amount of requests around how to do different things with VMware PowerCLI and the Pure Storage PowerShell SDK. How do I correlate a VMFS to a volume? How do I create a new VMFS? How do I expand? Etc.

To help our customers I have written a module that includes a lot of the common operations people might need to “connect” PowerCLI to our PowerShell SDK.

The module is called Cody.PureStorage.FlashArray.VMware. Continue reading “Pure Storage and VMware PowerShell Module”

Posted on

Site Recovery Manager and ActiveCluster Part III: Creating Protection Groups and Recovery Plans

Now that all of the prerequisites are complete, it is time to start creating protection groups and recovery plans.

This is part 3 of this series, the earlier parts were:

Continue reading “Site Recovery Manager and ActiveCluster Part III: Creating Protection Groups and Recovery Plans”

Posted on

Site Recovery Manager and ActiveCluster Part II: Configuring SRM

In my last post, I walked through configuring ActiveCluster and your VMware environment to prepare for use in Site Recovery Manager.

Site Recovery Manager and ActiveCluster Part I: Pre-SRM Configuration

In this post, I will walk through configuring Site Recovery Manager itself.  There are a few pre-requisites at this point:

  • Everything that was done in part 1.
  • Site Recovery Manager installed and paired
  • Inventory mappings in SRM are complete (network, folders, clusters, resource pools etc).
  • Downloaded and installed the FlashArray SRA 3.x or later on both SRM servers.

Continue reading “Site Recovery Manager and ActiveCluster Part II: Configuring SRM”

Posted on

Site Recovery Manager and ActiveCluster Part I: Pre-SRM Configuration

About four years ago, we (Pure Storage) released support for our asynchronous replication and Site Recovery Manager by releasing our storage replication adapter. In late 2017, we released our support for active-active synchronous replication called ActiveCluster.

Until SRM 6.1, SRM only supported active-passive replication, so a test failover or a failover would take a copy of the source VMFS (or RDM) on the target array and present it, rescan the ESXi environment, resignature the datastore(s) then register and power-on the VMs in accordance to the SRM recovery plan.

The downside to this of course is that the failover is disruptive–even if there was not actually a disaster that was the impetus for the failover. But this is the nature of active-passive replication.

In SRM 6.1, SRM introduced support for active-active replication. And because this type of replication is fundamentally different–SRM also changed how it behaved to take advantage of what active-active replication offers. Continue reading “Site Recovery Manager and ActiveCluster Part I: Pre-SRM Configuration”

Posted on

PowerCLI and VVols Part I: Assigning a SPBM Policy

There are a variety of ways to assign and set a SPBM Policy to a VM. I recently put out a workflow package for vRO to everything VVols and Pure:

vRealize Orchestrator VVol Workflow Package

I also specifically blogged about assigning a policy to a VM with vRO:

Assigning a VVol VM Storage Policy with vRO

How do you do this with PowerCLI?

Continue reading “PowerCLI and VVols Part I: Assigning a SPBM Policy”

Posted on

Tech Preview: vCenter Site Recovery Manager with ActiveCluster

An increasingly common use case for Active-Active replication in vSphere environments is vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) which I wrote about in this paper recently:

https://support.purestorage.com/Solutions/VMware_Platform_Guide/002ActiveCluster_with_VMware/PDF_Guide%3A_Implementing_vSphere_Metro_Storage_Cluster_With_ActiveCluster

This overviews how a stretched vSphere cluster interacts with the active-active replication we offer on the FlashArray called ActiveCluster. Continue reading “Tech Preview: vCenter Site Recovery Manager with ActiveCluster”

Posted on

vRealize Orchestrator VVol Workflow Package

Ok finally! I had this finished awhile ago, but I wrote it using our version 2.0 plugin–so I couldn’t post it until the plugin was certified by VMware. That plugin version is now certified and posted on the VMware Solution Exchange (see my post here).

Moving forward, we will likely be posting new workflows in various packages (working on an ActiveCluster one now), instead of including them directly in our plugin. This will make it easier to update them and add to them, without also having to generate an entire new plugin version.

So first, download and install the v2 FlashArray plugin for vRO and then install my workflow package for VVol on the VMware Solutions Exchange:

https://marketplace.vmware.com/vsx/solutions/flasharray-vvol-workflow-package-for-vro-1-0?ref=search 

Continue reading “vRealize Orchestrator VVol Workflow Package”

Posted on

FlashArray Plugin 2.0 for vRealize Orchestrator

We have published the FlashArray plugin 2.0 for vRealize Orchestrator on the VMware Solutions Exchange! Download it here:

https://marketplace.vmware.com/vsx/solutions/pure-storage-flasharray-plugin-for-vmware-vrealize-orchestrator-2-0-0

We put a lot of work into this one and I am quite excited for customers and partners to start using it.

There are three primary enhancements:

  1. New workflows
  2. New actions
  3. New scriptable objects

Continue reading “FlashArray Plugin 2.0 for vRealize Orchestrator”

Posted on

VMware Capacity Reporting Part V: VVols and UNMAP

Storage capacity reporting seems like a pretty straight forward topic. How much storage am I using? But when you introduce the concept of multiple levels of thin provisioning AND data reduction into it, all usage is not equal (does it compress well? does it dedupe well? is it zeroes?).

This multi-part series will break it down in the following sections:

  1. VMFS and thin virtual disks
  2. VMFS and thick virtual disks
  3. Thoughts on VMFS Capacity Reporting
  4. VVols and capacity reporting
  5. VVols and UNMAP

Let’s talk about the ins and outs of these in detail, then of course finish it up with why VVols makes this so much better.

NOTE: Examples in this are given from a FlashArray perspective. So mileage may vary depending on the type of array you have. The VMFS and above layer though are the same for all. This is the benefit of VMFS–it abstracts the physical layer. This is also the downside, as I will describe in these posts.

Continue reading “VMware Capacity Reporting Part V: VVols and UNMAP”