"Remember kids, the only difference between Science and screwing around is writing it down" -Alex Jason (made popular by Adam Savage)
I recently had the opportunity to test the VMware vCloud Air Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand service through VMware’s Early Access Program and wanted to share a quick walkthrough. Pretty easy to use and at sign up you can get a $3oo credit to check it out.
Continue reading “VMware vCloud Air Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand”
The vSphere Web Client Plugin for the Pure Storage FlashArray has been updated and released and it is the largest update to the plugin since, well, it was first released. A lot of feature enhancements–the majority focused on integrating local and remote replication management into the plugin. Our long term goal is to offer feature parity of FlashArray management with the plugin as compared to our own GUI. It is getting close. Let’s take a look at the new features.
Continue reading “Pure Storage vSphere Web Client Plugin 2.0 Released”
Quick post here. I am working on updating some documentation and I wanted to add a bit more color to a section on changing the IO Operations limit for ESXi NMP Round Robin devices. The Pure Storage recommendation is to change this value to one from the default of 1,000. Therefore, ESXi will switch logical paths after each I/O instead of 1,000. There are some performance benefits to this and some evidence for improved failover time (in the case of a path failure) with this setting. I am not going to get into the veracity of these benefits right now. What I wanted to share here is that there is no doubt changing this to 1 makes a big difference to I/O balance on the array itself. Continue reading “ESXi IO Operations Limit Parameter and IO Balance”
Pure Storage announced last week our very first converged architecture offering appropriately named FlashStack. The initial release of FlashStack is built off of Cisco hardware (UCS of course) and the FlashArray. We have two reference architectures presently, one for VMware Horizon View and one for general purpose VMware vSphere environments (choose your own guest OSes). My colleague Ravi Venkat (@ravivenk) architected the View ref arch, while I focused on the general vSphere one. In this blog post I am going to overview what we did with the vSphere ref arch. For more information on either, refer to the respective reference architecture white papers at the usual place:
Continue reading “FlashStack VMware vSphere Reference Architecture”
The most common request I get for scripts here at Pure Storage is an UNMAP script using PowerCLI. I have a basic one here that does the trick–UNMAPs Pure Storage volumes in a vCenter. That being said it is pretty dumb–doesn’t tell you much about what happened other than what volumes it is reclaiming (or not reclaiming) and moves on. A few requests have come in recently for something a little more in-depth. Most notably the ability to see how much space has been reclaimed. This information cannot be gathered from the VMware side of things–it has to come from the FlashArray.
There are two options here–either use our REST APIs or use our PowerShell toolkit to get this information (which just wraps the REST calls). For this script I chose to use the REST API directly from within PowerShell. What this script does is:
The script reports all of this to the console window, but it always throws it in a log file through add-content. If you don’t want it to return the info to the console, simply delete the write-host lines. If you don’t want it to log, delete the add-content lines.
There are a few required parameters–vCenter information (IP, username, password), FlashArray info (IP, username, password), UNMAP block count and a log file location. These are hard-coded parameters, but that can easily be changed by altering it to a read-host.
You may also note that after each UNMAP the script sleeps for 60 seconds–I do this so I make sure the FlashArray has time to update its information right after the UNMAP. 60 seconds is VERY conservative–probably 10 or so is fine, so feel free to mess with that number if you don’t like waiting. I also have another sleep at the end of each datastore operation to give a quick chance to review the latest results before it starts spewing the next datastore information on the screen (note this update didn’t make it into the video demo below–it doesn’t wait after each datastore).
See the script in action below. Essentially I am deleting a bunch of VMs across 4 datastores and then running the UNMAP. You can see the space get reclaimed on the FlashArray.
Note: You need particular access (see a blog post about that here) to vCenter to run UNMAP. For the FlashArray only Read Only is needed (higher of course is fine too).
Get the script here:
https://github.com/codyhosterman/powercli/blob/master/unmapsdk.ps1
UPDATE: In-guest UNMAP is now supported in a VM and sDelete and such is no longer required. Please refer to these posts:
In-Guest UNMAP Fix in ESXi 6.5 Part I: Windows
In-Guest UNMAP Fix in ESXi 6.5 Part II: Linux
Direct Guest OS UNMAP in vSphere 6.0
Reclaiming “dirty” or “dead” space is a topic that goes by my desk quite often these days–since the FlashArray is a data reduction array it is especially important that space is not wasted on the array–throws off the economics etc. Therefore UNMAP is an important VAAI feature to leverage in any AFA environment. Supporting UNMAP is definitely table stakes for AFAs.
Note–I am doing to use the terms “dead”, “dirty” and “stranded” to define space that needs to be reclaimed interchangeably. So anyways…
Unfortunately UNMAP in its current form does not satisfy all of the reclamation use cases. UNMAP will only reclaim space on any array when capacity is cleared from the VMFS volume–so when a VM (or virtual disk) is deleted or migrated elsewhere. It does not have the ability to reclaim space when data is “deleted” inside a virtual machine by the guest OS when using virtual disks. VMware does not know this capacity has been cleared and neither can the array. So until this virtual disk is deleted or moved the capacity cannot be reclaimed with UNMAP. So to be clear, UNMAP with vmkfstools (in ESXi 5.0/5.1) or esxcli (in ESXi 5.5) does not allow you to reclaim space that remains stranded inside of virtual disks.
Continue reading “Reclaiming in-guest capacity with VMware and Pure Storage”
The other day I stumbled upon a new VMware labs “Fling” called PowerActions. Basically it allows you to run in-context PowerShell/PowerCLI scripts right from within the vSphere Web Client. My mouth drooled at the promise of what this could deliver–and it really delivered! This is my new favorite tool by a landslide. See the announcement here from @alanrenouf http://www.virtu-al.net/2014/09/16/powercli-vsphere-web-clientannouncing-poweractions/. I’d recommend readin this first before you continue down with my post.
Continue reading “PowerActions–The PowerCLI Plugin for the vSphere Web Client with UNMAP”
Quick post here. So I have been reviewing some great posts from @vmKen and @BenMeadowcroft about automating Site Recovery Manager operations with PowerCLI and wanted to give it a try myself. They outlined the process rather clearly in their blogs so it was a breeze to get most of the stuff up and running. But when I went to actually execute a test recovery or a recovery etc. it kept failing! The PowerCLI command to start the recovery was $VMrp.Start($RPmode)–the $VMrp being my recovery plan and the $RPMode being the recovery plan mode of a recovery. The command was accepted but the recovery plan never started.
I got the following error in vCenter:
Unable to start the requested operation. Another operation may be in progress. Please wait for it to finish and try again.
Hmm…weird. I could kick off a test from the GUI with no issue so nothing was “interfering” from what I could tell. I thought maybe since I was using Site Recovery Manager 5.8 maybe something had changed so I tried it with my 5.5 environment and got the same result.
After I was about to lose my mind it finally occurred to me that I was connecting to the protected vCenter and the protected SRM server (I did enter in remote credentials for the recovery SRM server though). While I could query the recovery plan etc without issue from here, maybe SRM didn’t allow a recovery plan to be started unless you directly connected to the recovery vCenter/SRM server.
So I reconnected to the recovery site and it worked! So I guess it makes a difference, so FYI. Now there might be a workaround to this and it is definitely possible I missed something that allows this but this seems to be what you need to do. If you find this isn’t true please let me know!
Thanks Ken and Ben for getting me started!! Cool stuff. Kens posts:
http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2014/05/automate-failover-with-srm.html
http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2014/05/srm-powercli-reporting.html
http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2014/05/powercli-and-the-srm-api.html
I have done a few posts on here that involve the Pure Storage Plugin for the vSphere Web Client (here and here) since I joined. Well here is another. We just released a new version of the Web Client Plugin (I am going to refer to it as WCP for the rest of this post because I am a lazy typist). We bundle the WCP into Purity and therefore the WCP is installed, updated and uninstalled from our GUI/CLI to vCenter (yes we do also offer a mechanism to update it outside of upgrading Purity itself). Our latest release of Purity, 4.0.12, includes WCP version 1.1.13–while there is no new functionality there are two important fixes.
Continue reading “Pure Storage Web Client Plugin version 1.1.13”
The Pure Storage Content Pack for VMware vCenter Log Insight is now live on the VMware Solution Exchange! Download it today for free. As past posts have shown I have done a decent amount of work with Log Insight here at Pure and in my previous job. A product I have really liked from VMware for a variety of reasons, a big one being that it is so very easy to use. We really improved our syslog feature on the FlashArray in the 4.0 Purity release, so it was the perfect time to create our first content pack!
Continue reading “The Pure Storage Content Pack 1.0 for VMware vCenter Log Insight”