Category: PowerShell

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Updating a volume group name on the FlashArray for VVols

The FlashArray implementation of Virtual Volumes surfaces VMs on the FlashArray as standard volume groups. The volume group being named by the virtual machine name. Each VVol is then added and removed to the volume group as they are provisioned or deleted. These objects though are fairly flexible–we do not use the volume group as a unique identifier of the virtual machine–internally we use key/value tags for that.

The benefit of that design is that you can delete the volume groups, rename them, or add and remove other volumes to it. Giving you some flexibility to group related VMs or whatever your use case might be to move things around, without breaking our VVol implementation.

Continue reading “Updating a volume group name on the FlashArray for VVols”
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PowerCLI and VVols Part VI: Running a Test Failover

This post I will talk about using PowerCLI to run a test failover for VVol-based virtual machines. One of the many nice things about VVols is that in the VASA 3.0 API this process is largely automated for you. The SRM-like workflow of a test failover is included–so the amount of storage-related PowerShell you have to manually write is fairly minimal.

Continue reading “PowerCLI and VVols Part VI: Running a Test Failover”
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1.1.0.2 Release of the Pure Storage VMware PowerShell Module

I have released a new version of the VMware/Pure PowerShell module which can be automatically installed from the PowerShell Gallery.

Pure Storage PowerShell VMware Module

Updates in this release are focused on VVols. Creating VVol snapshots, copying them, creating new disks from them, retrieving them etc.

Version 1.1.0.2

I wrote a blog post below on using some of the new cmdlets:

PowerCLI and VVols Part V: Array Snapshots and VVols

Continue reading “1.1.0.2 Release of the Pure Storage VMware PowerShell Module”

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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”

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PowerCLI and VVols Part IV: Correlating a Windows NTFS to a VMDK

My last post in this series was about getting a VVol UUID and figuring out what volume on a FlashArray it is. But what about the step before that? If I have a guest OS file system how do I even figure out what VMDK it is?

There is a basic option, which can potentially be used, which is correlating the bus ID and the unit ID of the device in the guest and matching it to what VMware displays for the virtual disks.

But that always felt to me as somewhat inexact.  What if you accidentally look at the wrong VM object and then do something to a volume you do not mean to? Or the opposite?

Not ideal. Luckily there is a more exact approach. I will focus this particular post on Windows. I will look at Linux in an upcoming one.

Continue reading “PowerCLI and VVols Part IV: Correlating a Windows NTFS to a VMDK”

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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”

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Volume matching via the API in Purity 5.0

Core to most scripting with the FlashArray is figuring out what volume is on what FlashArray. Then you proceed to do what you need with it (snapshot, report metrics, whatever).

Traditionally how this was done, at least from a VMware perspective was via the NAA (network address authority). You take this number, which is how ESXi uniquely addresses a volume and slice it up to find the array serial and the volume serial. By matching the section with a particular array serial, you have identified what array owns it. Then you can make the calls to that array.

Details on how this worked are beyond the scope of this post, but you can see this here:

VMFS Snapshots and the FlashArray Part IV: How to correlate a VMFS to a FlashArray volume Continue reading “Volume matching via the API in Purity 5.0”

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Unattended VMFS UNMAP Script

I updated my UNMAP PowerCLI script a month or so ago and improved quite a few things–but I did remove hard-coded variables and replaced it with interactive input. Which is fine for some, but for many it was not.

Note: Move to VMFS-6 in vSphere 6.5 and you don’t have to worry about this UNMAP business anymore 🙂

Essentially, quite a few people want to run it as a scheduled task in Windows, and if it requires input that just isn’t going to work out of the box. So I have created an unattended version of the script. For details read on.

Note: I will continue to update the script (bugs, features, etc.) but will note them on my other blog post about the script here:

Pure Storage FlashArray UNMAP PowerCLI Script for VMware ESXi

I will only update this post if the unattended version changes in a way that makes these instructions wrong. Continue reading “Unattended VMFS UNMAP Script”

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PowerShell GUI VMware and FlashArray Storage Management Tool

Here is my storage manager for the FlashArray and VMware. Based on PowerCLI, but uses a front end GUI. Enjoy!

NOTICE THIS HAS BEEN DEPRECATED IN FAVOR OF THE POWERSHELL MODULE HERE:
https://www.codyhosterman.com/scripts-and-tools/pure-storage-powershell-vmware-module/

There are a variety of methods of managing VMware objects (VMFS volumes, VMs, VMDKs and RDMs) and the underlying snapshots to recovery or clone them. But often I get asked if I have a PowerShell (PowerCLI) script to do one or all of them. I have a bunch on my GitHub, but I decided a week or so ago to put something a bit more robust together. At first I was making it a standard interactive script, but it morphed into a GUI, using combo-boxes etc:

Continue reading “PowerShell GUI VMware and FlashArray Storage Management Tool”