"Remember kids, the only difference between Science and screwing around is writing it down" -Alex Jason (made popular by Adam Savage)
The FlashArray Storage Replication Adapter for VMware Site Recovery Manager supports many:many replication since the 2.0 release of the SRA. Use of test failover, failover and reprotect is no different than with 1:1, and nor is the setup of the volumes. The only real difference is how you configure the array managers in SRM. So let’s review how this is done.
Continue reading “Multi-site FlashArray Configuration with Site Recovery Manager”
So a few updates. I just updated my vSphere Best Practices guide and it can be found here:
Download Best Practices Guide PDF
I normally do not create a blog post about updating the guide, but this one was a major overhaul and I think is worth mentioning. Furthermore, there are a few documents I have written and published that I want to mention.
Continue reading “Documentation Update, Best Practices and vRealize”
This is the second part of this post. In the first post, I explained the fix and how it affected Windows. In this post, we will overview how the change affects Linux-based virtual machines. See the original post here:
In-Guest UNMAP Fix in ESXi 6.5 Part I: Windows
I posted about In-Guest UNMAP with Linux VMs in this post:
What’s new in ESXi 6.5 Storage Part I: UNMAP
One thing you can note is that automatic UNMAP works quite well, but manual UNMAP, like fstrim did not. So let’s revisit fstrim now that this patch is out. Continue reading “In-Guest UNMAP Fix in ESXi 6.5 Part II: Linux”
As you might’ve seen, Cormac Hogan just posted about an UNMAP fix that was just released. This is a fix I have been eagerly awaiting for some time, so I am very happy to see it released. And thankfully it does not disappoint.
First off, some official information:
https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2148989
https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/patch#search
Or you can run esxcli if you ESXi host has internet access to download and install automatically:
esxcli software profile update -p ESXi-6.5.0-20170304001-standard -d https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml
Continue reading “In-Guest UNMAP Fix in ESXi 6.5 Part I: Windows”
So I am in the middle of updating my best practices guide for vSphere on FlashArray and one of the topics I am looking into providing better guidance around is ESXi queue management. This breaks down to a few things:
I have had more than a few questions lately about handling this–either just general queries or performance escalations. And generally from what I have found it comes down to fundamental understanding of how ESXi queuing works. And how the FlashArray plays with it. So I put a blog post together of a use case and walking through solving a performance problem. Explaining concepts along the way.
Please note:
I am sorry, this is a long one. But hopefully informative!
If you prefer a video, here is my 1 hr VMworld session that goes into depth on what I write below:
Continue reading “Understanding VMware ESXi Queuing and the FlashArray”
This is a blog I have been waiting a long time to write. The past year and a half of my work has heavily focused on improving and building our VMware vRealize integration at Pure Storage. Log Insight and Operations Manager integration already existed (analytics etc.), so the next logical step is actually provisioning (orchestration). So vRealize Orchestrator and Automation. The first step I took was using the built-in REST plugin in vRO to build a workflow package that customers could use to actually manage the FlashArray without much work on their own part inside of vRO.
I started to realize that a workflow package was not enough. Especially when it comes to vRA Anything-As-A-Service integration. A big part of what is missing from a workflow package is custom objects and inventory management. Something that a plugin can easily achieve. So, without further ado–please meet the FlashArray vRO plugin! Downloadable at the VMware Solution Exchange and fully certified by VMware and Pure Storage:
My vRO plugin white paper Continue reading “Introducing the FlashArray Plugin for vRealize Orchestrator v1.0”
This is part 7 of this 7 part series. Questions around managing VMFS snapshots have been cropping up a lot lately and I realized I didn’t have a lot of specific Pure Storage and VMware resignaturing information out there. Especially around scripting all of this and the various options to do this. So I put a long series out here about how to do all of this.
The series being:
Continue reading “VMFS Snapshots and the FlashArray Part VII: Restoring a VM”
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”
This is part 6 of this 8 part series. Questions around managing VMFS snapshots have been cropping up a lot lately and I realized I didn’t have a lot of specific Pure Storage and VMware resignaturing information out there. Especially around scripting all of this and the various options to do this. So I put a long series out here about how to do all of this.
The series being:
Using vCenter and our Web Client plugin, recovering a snapshot is a pretty straight forward process. So the pre-requisite here is having our Web Client plugin installed and configured. Info on that here. If you want to know the manual steps, scroll down further and the whole process is described in detail that does not use the plugin–just our GUI and vCenter. Continue reading “VMFS Snapshots and the FlashArray Part VI: Mounting a FlashArray VMFS Snapshot”
So vSphere 6.5 introduced VMFS-6 which came with the highly-desired automatic UNMAP. Yay! But some users still might need to run manual UNMAP on it for some reason. Immediate reasons that come to mind are:
When you run manual UNMAP one of the options you can specify is the block count. The UNMAP process since 5.5 iterates through the VMFS, by issuing reclaim to a small part of the VMFS, one at a time, until UNMAP has been issued to all of the free space. The block count dictates how big that segment is. By default ESXi will use 200 blocks (which is 200 MB). Continue reading “Issue with Manual VMFS-6 UNMAP and Block Count”