Category: PowerShell

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Detecting what FlashArray VMFS Volumes Have Dead Space

Another UNMAP post, are you shocked? A common question that came up was what volumes have dead space? What datastores should I run UNMAP on?

My usual response was, well it is hard to say. Dead space is introduced when you move a VM or you delete one. The array will not release the space until you either delete the physical volume, overwrite it, or issue UNMAP. Until vSphere 6.5, UNMAP for VMFS was not automatic. You had to run a CLI command to do it. So that leads back to the question, well I have 100 datastores, which ones should I run it on?

So to find out, you need to know two things:

  1. How much space the file system reports as currently being used.
  2. How much space the array is physically storing for the volume hosting that file system.

Continue reading “Detecting what FlashArray VMFS Volumes Have Dead Space”

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Protection Group Recovery in PowerShell

Awhile back I wrote about performing an operation introduced in Purity 4.6 called protection group copy, which I really referred to as protection group recovery, which I think is maybe a more apt title.

Anyways, this feature is available in our REST API and our CLI (not yet in our GUI in a direct format) but is not yet built into our PowerShell SDK.  I have seen more than one request for information on how to do this, and it certainly can be done without our official SDK and this is through the good ol’ Invoke-RestMethod cmdlet built into PowerShell. I’ve spoken about using this many times, here and here.

Let’s walk through it specifically with protection group restore.

Continue reading “Protection Group Recovery in PowerShell”

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Force the Invoke-RestMethod PowerShell cmdlet to use TLS 1.2

I wrote about some security changes in the FlashArray operating environment (called Purity) version 4.7 a month or so back. This was concerning the deprecation of SSL and TLS version 1.0, forcing all (management) connections to the FlashArray to use TLS 1.1 or 1.2 (read this here).

Our PowerShell SDK was enhanced so it would use the appropriate security connection type so users of that do not need to worry as long as they upgrade our SDK. But what about the few remaining functions that people might use that the PowerShell SDK doesn’t cover? As there are a few REST calls that are not built into the SDK (yet).  Continue reading “Force the Invoke-RestMethod PowerShell cmdlet to use TLS 1.2”

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FlashArray Host Group Creation PowerShell Script for VMware Clusters

New script to automatically create hosts groups on FlashArrays based on VMware ESXi clusters. This is a script I’ve had out for awhile but only recently revisited and realized it was way out of date and frankly, not very good. So I trashed most of it and re-wrote it. You can find it here:

https://github.com/codyhosterman/powercli/blob/master/createhostgroups.ps1

It is pretty self-explanatory I suppose, but it’s good to review the finer points before you run it. Continue reading “FlashArray Host Group Creation PowerShell Script for VMware Clusters”

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Using PowerShell with the VMware Log Insight REST API

I have quite a few PowerShell scripts these days and I run a bunch of them quite often. All of my scripts log information to a file so I can see what happened but I decided I wanted to log them into something that could help me analyze or quickly review the data. Something better than looking at a bunch of text files. One of my favorite products, VMware Log Insight was the first thing I thought of. The ingestion REST API makes the most sense. Took a little time to figure out the best way to do it, but it’s working great now. To the details!

Continue reading “Using PowerShell with the VMware Log Insight REST API”

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ESXCLI updates in PowerCLI 6.3 R1

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.

Continue reading “ESXCLI updates in PowerCLI 6.3 R1”

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FlashArray UNMAP Script with the Pure Storage PowerShell SDK and PowerActions

I have officially decided to “retire” my UNMAP script that uses direct REST calls to find before and after capacity changes for given volumes. I am only updating the one that uses the Pure Storage PowerShell SDK from this point on–using this is much more robust, not tied to direct API versions and greatly simplifies managing the data in the script.clip_image006

I have also created a second version for use in the VMware Fling called PowerActions. This allows the script to be executed from the vSphere Web Client.

Continue reading “FlashArray UNMAP Script with the Pure Storage PowerShell SDK and PowerActions”

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Querying SRM for Protected VMs with PowerCLI

I was recently asked how to query SRM for protected VMs and I decided it would make a good quick blog post. There is a great post here on using PowerCLI with SRM, but it doesn’t show the information to return per virtual machine information by default. Needs a bit more.

All it returns is a SRM-based virtual machine ID which doesn’t relate to what a user is probably looking for (a virtual machine name). So it needs a few more simple steps. The following script which can be found on my GitHub page here that does the following things:

  1. Connects to a vCenter
  2. Connects to SRM
  3. Creates a log folder with a time stamp in the name
  4. Iterates through each Protection Group
  5. Logs every virtual machine in that protection group

Continue reading “Querying SRM for Protected VMs with PowerCLI”