Category: VMware

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SRM Cannot Identify Replicated Datastores on iSCSI Devices

So we ran into a customer issue recently with VMware Site Recovery Manager that I have not seen before and have not found any on-point articles on, so I thought I’d share this one. Was an insidious one too, when troubleshooting this one I could not find the issue, eventually one of our rockstar escalation engineers at Pure (Jacob Hopkinson) figured it out after going through SRM debug logs line by line. Comes down to case sensitivity in iSCSI IQNs. I’ll explain…

Continue reading “SRM Cannot Identify Replicated Datastores on iSCSI Devices”

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Pure Storage vRealize Orchestrator Workflow Package v1.2

I just released the 1.2 version of the Pure Storage FlashArray Workflow Package for vRealize Orchestrator. Like always, you can get this from GitHub:

https://github.com/codyhosterman/orchestrator/

If you haven’t looked at our vRO workflow package, check out my original post here:

FlashArray Workflow Package for vRealize Orchestrator

While this isn’t a huge release in terms of new features, I think it is an important one because it adds (among others) one particularly important workflow. Translating a VMFS datastore object into a FlashArray volume name. Let’s take a look.

Continue reading “Pure Storage vRealize Orchestrator Workflow Package v1.2”

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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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Top vBlog 2016 Voting

Quick shameless plug post. The top vBlog voting for 2016 is out!

http://vsphere-land.com/news/voting-now-open-for-top-vblog-2016.html

My blog is listed for a candidate for top blog and top storage-related blog. If my blog has helped you out and/or you like it please vote for it! I really appreciate it, while I love blogging and will continue to regardless it is a lot of work to keep up and the recognition is greatly appreciated! Keeps me motivated 🙂

Only takes a few minutes!

Thanks!

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FlashArray VMware Best Practices PowerCLI Scripts

I wrote a post recently on the updates made to the PowerCLI 6.3 R1 esxcli implementation, so the logical next step was to implement this new behavior into my PowerCLI scripts that use esxcli. I still have a few scripts to update, but my two best practice-related scripts are ready to go. The two scripts are:

  1. Script to check and set best practices. Download here:
  2. Script to just check best practices, and lists issues in a report. Download here.

While I was updating them for esxcli changes, I figured i might as well improve them too, so there are quite a few changes for both. Let’s take a look.

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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.

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vRealize Automation and the FlashArray

I want to say this is the culmination of my last almost two years of creating vRealize integration for Pure Storage, but that isn’t the right word. It is a milestone, because there is still so much more cool stuff to be done. Especially with vRealize Automation. In many ways it is just the beginning! But I can now demonstrate Pure Storage FlashArray integration with the whole vRealize stack: Log Insight, Operations, Orchestrator and Automation.

Log Insight has a Content Pack. Operations has the Management Pack. Orchestrator has the Workflow Package. Automation also uses that Workflow Package. Let’s talk about how.

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Recent ESXi 6 Storage Bugs and the FlashArray

As you might be aware, there have been a few storage-related issues with ESXi 6.0 as of late:

Accidental PDL during dropped paths:

Storage PDL responses may not trigger path failover in vSphere 6.0 (2144657)

Host issues during smartd inquiries:

Issuing a 0x85 SCSI Command from a VMware ESXi 6.0 host results in a PDL error (2133286)

The question that comes up for the Pure Storage FlashArray is are we susceptible? The short answer is no. Let’s explain why. Continue reading “Recent ESXi 6 Storage Bugs and the FlashArray”

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Semi-transparent failover with VMFS and Active/Passive Replication

So in a blog series that I started a few weeks back (still working on finishing it), I wrote about managing snapshots and resignaturing of VMFS volumes. One of the posts was dedicated to why I would choose resignaturing over force mounting almost all of the time.

An obvious question after that post is, well when would I want to force mount? There is a situation where i think it is a decent option. A failover situation where the recovery site is the same site as the production site, in terms of compute/vCenter. The storage is what fails over to another array. This is a situation I see increasingly common as network pipes are getting bigger.

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