Category: VMware

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vRealize Orchestrator and Invoke a REST Host Workflow

Continuing my recent work on learning vRealize Orchestrator and ran into some funkiness with the “Invoke REST host” workflow, that I wanted to write down so I don’t forget how I fixed/worked around it (which I suppose is the impetus for basically every post I do). Anyways, I am working on a REST-based package for the FlashArray and I was using that workflow and had some trouble. Basically, any REST call I made through it to a REST host seemed to fail.

schema Continue reading “vRealize Orchestrator and Invoke a REST Host Workflow”

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Understanding vRealize Orchestrator Authentication with the FlashArray REST API

UPDATE: This is a older post, but after working with vRO for longer and learning a lot more about it I decided I needed to re-write this post. Too much of it was not the best way to do things.

One of the projects that I have recently taken up is figuring out how to leverage vRealize Orchestrator to manage and execute operations on the FlashArray. Managing the FlashArray is rather easy of course, most of the work revolved around getting vRO up and running (note in vRO 7.0 all of this is much easier) and learning the product itself and brushing up on my Javascript. I think vRO is a pretty great tool, just takes some time to figure out as not everything in it is quite intuitive, but it seems well ahead of what is was when I last used it a few years back. Once you get the feel of how to leverage it though, you can see how powerful it could be. I’ve just scratched the surface of it and am already excited on what I can put together.

orchestrateallthethings Continue reading “Understanding vRealize Orchestrator Authentication with the FlashArray REST API”

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vRealize Orchestrator and vSphere 6 SSO Authentication

Starting to mess around with vRealize Orchestrator and just deployed the 6.0.3 vRO appliance. A few gotchas, many of which are well denoted by other blog posts:

  1. DNS, DNS, DNS!! Pre-configure everything and make sure names are correct
  2. Certificates, make sure they are accurate
  3. NTP

One of the first issues I ran into was registering it with my SSO. My setup has two vCenters with two separate but federated Platform Services Controllers. I wanted to authenticate my vRO instance with SSO, not my Active Directory to keep user management a bit more central to VMware. Ran into some fun gotchas. Continue reading “vRealize Orchestrator and vSphere 6 SSO Authentication”

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Site Recovery Manager and Raw Device Mappings (RDMs)

Somewhat surprisingly I have been getting a fair amount of questions in the past few months concerning VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager and Raw Device Mappings (RDMs) and using this with Pure Storage. Common question is whether or not we support this (we do) but more commonly it is about how it works. There is a bit of a misunderstanding on how they differ or do not differ from VMFS management in SRM. So figured I would put a post out to explain this. Old topic somewhat, but worth reviewing for those newer SRM customers. Plus, I haven’t found a whole lot of on-point posts anywhere, so why not?

intro Continue reading “Site Recovery Manager and Raw Device Mappings (RDMs)”

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VMFork, InstantClone, Project Fargo Oh My! Part 1: Walkthrough

One of the things in vSphere 6.0 that I really wanted to look at was the Instant Clone functionality that was included in the release. Instant Clone (AKA Project Fargo AKA VMFork) is the ability to essentially instantly create new virtual machines that are identical copies of a running parent VM by sharing the current memory and virtual disk files of that parent. The “forked” VMs are basically resumed copies of a stunned parent and the disk write/memory changes are committed down to delta VMDKs or delta memory pages while the children continue to read from any unchanged data in the parent VMDKs.

Fargo-poster

Plenty of other people have gone into more detail on this and the architecture, so instead of me re-writing all of this check out this post from Duncan Epping:

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2014/10/07/project-fargo-aka-vmfork-what-is-it/

Or Google it.

Cool stuff. So I plan on doing a few different posts on this, tons of thoughts how this could be used, this first post though will focus on just simply setting it up. Continue reading “VMFork, InstantClone, Project Fargo Oh My! Part 1: Walkthrough”

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VMware SRM and the PBM & PreCloneCheckCallback error

Quick post here. I recently updated my environment to vCenter 6.0 Update 1 and VMware Site Recovery Manager 6.1 and after my first attempted test failover (and subsequent ones) the test would always fail when it tried to power on the virtual machines. Some powered-on and some didn’t. The following errors appeared for about half of my VMs:

error

Continue reading “VMware SRM and the PBM & PreCloneCheckCallback error”

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FlashArray and VMware documentation update for vSphere 6

I have completed updates for two of my main VMware vSphere documents for the Pure Storage FlashArray. These include the standard best practices document and the white paper explaining VAAI in detail and how it works on the FlashArray.

vmwarebpvaai

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Best Practices Document Link

VAAI White Paper Link

The best practices document has mainly been updated with information that this blog has shown in the past couple of months. Notably:

  • vSphere 6 updates, support for Web Client Plugin versions, changes in virtual disk recommendations, in-guest UNMAP support, etc
  • VMFS UNMAP changes when it comes to best practice recommendations
  • vRealize Operations Management Pack
  • EFI-enabled VMs and Disk.DiskMaxIOSize

In the VAAI document, it is a similar update:

  • vSphere 6 changes, mainly focused on the thin virtual disk XCOPY enhancements
  • UNMAP changes, block counts, performance and in-guest support (EnableBlockDelete)

Both documents are also updated for FlashArray//m, but it is mainly a cosmetic change as nothing really changes for the VMware environment, no recommendations are changed. Of course the documents are also cleaned up and re-arranged to be more reader friendly with a semi-new format as well.

Important! If you have old versions of these documents, delete them! These get updated frequently (a few times a year at least) and these changes can be important. When needing to refer to the guides, please check back to the Pure Storage community for the latest version.

Enjoy! As always feedback on these documents is ALWAYS welcome.

 

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UNMAP Block Count Behavior Change in ESXi 5.5 P3+

I recently was doing some troubleshooting for a customer that was using my UNMAP PowerCLI script and discovered a change in ESXi 5.5+ UNMAP. The issue was that the script was taking quite a while to complete. After some logic optimizations and increasing timeouts the script was sped up a bit and less timeout errors occurred, but a bunch of the UNMAP operations were still taking a lot longer than expected. Eventually we threw our hands up and said it was good enough. A bit more recently, I was testing a 3rd party UNMAP tool and ran into similar behavior so I dug into it a bit more and found some semi-unexpected changes in how UNMAP works, specifically the behavior when leveraging non-default block iteration counts. Continue reading “UNMAP Block Count Behavior Change in ESXi 5.5 P3+”

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Changing an ESXi SATP Rule

One of the few hard requirements we make to configure best practices on ESXi for the FlashArray is to create a SATP rule. A SATP rule simply describes a certain configuration (mainly around multipathing) for a specific set of devices (usually devices from an array). For the FlashArray, this rule consists of making sure devices are using Round Robin and an I/O operations limit of 1.

esxcli storage nmp satp rule add -s VMW_SATP_ALUA -V PURE -M FlashArray -P “VMW_PSP_RR” -O iops=1 -e “FlashArray SATP Rule”

Continue reading “Changing an ESXi SATP Rule”