"Remember kids, the only difference between Science and screwing around is writing it down" -Alex Jason (made popular by Adam Savage)
Finally starting to catch up on work after VMworld. A lot of blog posts queued up in my head that I want to start getting out. Here is the first. I have completed an update of the FlashArray workflow package with some bug fixes and some new workflows. As always the workflow package can be found here:
https://github.com/codyhosterman/orchestrator/blob/master/com.purestorage.codyhosterman.package
Continue reading “1.7 Release of the FlashArray Workflow Package for vRealize Orchestrator”
A recent question I got about my UNMAP PowerCLI script was it says it was using a certain block count but when I looked at the log it was using 200. Why?
Well I blogged before about why a given UNMAP process might revert to the default block count of 200 here. Essentially, if you indicate a block count larger than 1% of the free space of the VMFS ESXi will revert it to 200. Or if the VMFS is more than 75% full it will always override the block count back down to 200. Continue reading “VMFS UNMAP switches block count”
As I have blogged about before, TLS 1.0 and SSL v3 were deprecated in Purity 4.7, requiring all connections to use either TLS 1.1 or TLS 1.2. This affected a variety of integrations, some we updated, some you just had to alter their behavior. A few VMware products do not/did not use TLS 1.1/1.2 by default, so they either need to altered or upgraded. This almost invariably boiled down to the JDK version that was in use. vRealize Orchestrator is no exception.
Continue reading “vRealize Orchestrator, TLS 1.2 and Certificate Importing”
Let me start out with saying I’m embarrassed I have only been using vRO for 8 months or so. It is AWESOME.
The FlashArray Workflow Package for vRealize Orchestrator has been updated to include two new objects:
The creation of the first part is explained in this post. But if you are using the FlashArray it is all built into the package, so you have to do very little work. I’ll explain in a bit.
The UNMAP workflow is generic–it can be used with any VMFS datastore that supports UNMAP. So it is included in the workflow package and it is also standalone for those of you who don’t have a FlashArray. You can get the standalone here:
https://github.com/codyhosterman/orchestrator/blob/master/vmfsunmap.workflow
Virtual disk oversubscription is becoming increasingly common and so is allowing people to provision their own VMs. So increasing a datastore capacity is also an increasingly common operation. Because of the performance of flash, merged with ESXi features like VAAI ATS. Expanding a VMFS is easy. Expanding a storage volume these days is easy. But you still have to actually do it. What if I want to automate the process to respond to datastore capacity threshold limits? There are a variety of ways to achieve this. Let’s look at it via vCenter SNMP alerts and vRealize Orchestrator workflows. Continue reading “Automatic VMFS expansion with vCenter SNMP and vRealize Orchestrator”
Quick post. I have released the FlashArray Workflow Package for vRealize Orchestrator version 1.3. Not a huge update but a few changes/new features.
Continue reading “FlashArray Workflow Package for vRealize Orchestrator version 1.3”
I am working on adding some functionality to the FlashArray workflow package for vRealize Orchestrator and one of those features is automating the process to increase the capacity of a VMFS volume. The FlashArray potion of that is pretty straight forward but what of the VMFS portion? Not much on the internet directly about this. Luckily using the vCenter SDK with vRO, this is pretty easy. Continue reading “Increasing VMFS capacity with vRealize Orchestrator”
Hey all. Just wanted to let you know there is an updated Pure Storage FlashArray Storage Replication Adapter now posted on VMware’s Site Recovery Manager compatibility guide:
Continue reading “FlashArray Storage Replication Adapter version 1.5 for SRM”
This is an issue I discovered along with my good friend and former colleague Drew Tonnesen a few years back which has cropped up a few times in recent days. I noticed there wasn’t really any information about it online, so made sense to put a quick post together.
In short, Windows 2012 R2 virtual machine clone or Storage vMotion operations complete much slower when powered-on as compared to when power-off. The common explanation is that VAAI XCOPY does not work when the VM is powered-on. This is not exactly true. Let me explain. Continue reading “VAAI XCOPY not being used with Powered-On Windows VM”
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”