"Remember kids, the only difference between Science and screwing around is writing it down" -Alex Jason (made popular by Adam Savage)
As people are probably aware, VMware just released the slew of new product updates that was announced at VMworld. vSphere 5.5 U2 at the core, but essentially all of the major products had updates–the one in particular interest to me was vCenter Site Recovery Manager. This latest release, numbered 5.8 is probably the biggest update to SRM since probably 5.0 moving to 5.1, arguably bigger. I am still playing around with it, but I wanted to share some of the things I found of interest in it.
Phew another VMworld under my belt! Tons of fun and tons of work! Pure Storage had its largest presence ever at VMworld–we certainly painted Moscone orange in addition to unleashing an arsenal of nerf guns (4,500) upon the city. This post is meant to be more of a photo album of the week and what Pure was involved in–technical posts of things that we did there will be forthcoming.
Today I posted a new document to our repository on purestorage.com: Pure Storage and VMware Storage APIs for Array Integration—VAAI. This is a new white paper that describes in detail the VAAI block primitives that VMware offers and that we support. Furthermore, performance expectations are described, comparing before/after and how the operations do at scale. There are some best practices listed as well, the why and how of those recommendations are also described within.
I have to say, especially when it comes to XCOPY, I have never seen a storage array do so well with it. It is really quite impressive how fast XCOPY sessions complete and how scaling it up (in terms of numbers of VMs or size of the VMDKs) doesn’t weaken the process at all. The main purpose of this post is to alert you to the new document but I will go over some high level performance pieces of information as well. Read the document for the details and more.
A bit of a long rambling one here. Here it goes…
Virtual Disk allocation mechanism choice is something that was somewhat of a hot topic a few years back with the “thin on thin” question almost becoming a religious debate at times. Essentially this has cooled down and vendors have made their recommendations and end users have their preferences and that’s that. With the true advent of the all-flash-array such as the Pure Storage FlashArray with deduplication, compression, pattern removal etc. I feel like this somewhat basic topic is worth revisiting now.
To review there are three main virtual disk types (there are others, namely SESparse but I am going to stick with the most common for this discussion):
Continue reading “Pure Storage FlashArray and Re-Examining VMware Virtual Disk Types”
Previously I blogged about using PowerShell with the Pure Storage FlashArray to enable scripting of common tasks like provisioning or snapshotting. In that post I showed how to use SSH to run Purity operations, but with the introduction of the REST APIs (fully available in 3.4+) there is now a much better and cleaner way to script this. You no longer need to install extra SSH modules and the like, all you need is the Invoke-RestMethod in PowerShell.
Continue reading “PowerShell and Pure Storage REST API Scripting”
A lot of activity coming up this year at VMworld 2014 and Pure Storage has a large part in it. Between our booth, staffing presence, tons of sessions and 1:1 meetings there aren’t any steps we are missing. This will be my 7th VMworld and from a storage perspective I have never been more excited! A lot in store by VMware (notably vVols) and Pure has some great demo we are working on as well.
Heyo–quick post here. One of my first focuses since joining Pure Storage was to update their best practices guide for VMware vSphere. It’s finally out! Updates include a lot of the stuff that I have posted on this blog as of late (essentially whatever I worked on that day went also directly here–I won’t always be this prolific).
Continue reading “Updated Best Practices document for VMware vSphere and Pure Storage FlashArrays”
I’ve done a few VMware Log Insight posts in the past year but I have yet to do one for Pure Storage. Log Insight is a product that I really love and VMware has been updating it like crazy since its initial release. Just recently they announced the 2.0 version of Log Insight (more info here). Besides just being functionally useful it is VERY easy to use–from kicking off the deployment (it is an OVA) to first use it takes about ten minutes maximum.
Continue reading “Using VMware Log Insight with the Pure Storage FlashArray”
Scripting is a wonderful thing–saves me tons of time. PowerShell is no exception. VMware offers a very robust PowerShell cmdlet offering (called PowerCLI) which allows you to do essentially anything you can think of in vSphere. Of course this is all specific to VMware or Windows. What about including scripting commands for Pure Storage into PowerShell (PowerCLI) scripts? It is actually pretty simple using the readily available SSH plugin for PowerShell.
Continue reading “PowerShell and the Pure Storage FlashArray CLI”
Ah access controls…always popular–who doesn’t want everyone to be admins?! Well…um…admins don’t! In this post I am going to run through integrating Active Directory with the Pure Storage FlashArray. Then talk about how it works with the vSphere Web Client Plugin because I would be ashamed if I didn’t at least mention VMware once in a post.
Continue reading “Integrating Active Directory with the Pure Storage FlashArray”
