Category: VMware

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VMware PowerCLI and Pure Storage

This is a post I plan on just updating on a rolling basis. I have been working on updating the vSphere and Pure Storage Best Practices document and there are few settings that can be tweaked to increase performance. A common question I have and occasionally receive is can this be easily simplified or automated? Of course! And PowerCLI is the best option in most cases–I will continue to add to this post or update it as I find newer or better ways of doing things.

****UPDATED SCRIPTS AND NEW FUNCTIONALITY check out this blog post for insight****

Update: get my scripts on my GitHub page here:

https://github.com/codyhosterman/powercli

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Deeper dive on vSphere UNMAP block count with Pure Storage

I posted a week or so ago about the ESXCLI UNMAP process with vSphere 5.5 on the Pure Storage FlashArray here and came up with the conclusion that larger block counts are highly beneficial to the UNMAP process. So the recommendation was simply use a larger block count than the default to speed up the UNMAP operation, something sufficiently higher than the default of 200 MB. I received a few questions about a more specific recommendation (and had some myself) so I decided to dive into this a little deeper to see if I could provide some guidance that was a little more concrete. In the end a large block count is perfectly fine–if you want to know more details–read on!

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VMware Dead Space Reclamation (UNMAP) and Pure Storage

One of the main things I have been doing in my first few weeks at Pure Storage (which has been nothing but awesome so far by the way) is going through all of our VMware best practices and integration points. Testing them, seeing how they work or can they be improved etc. The latest thing I looked into was Dead Space Reclamation (which from here on out I will just refer to as UNMAP) with the Pure Storage FlashArray and specifically ESXi 5.5. This is a pretty straight forward process but I did find something interesting that is worth noting.

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Changing the default VMware Round Robin IO Operation Limit value for Pure Storage FlashArray devices

This is a topic I have posted about in the past but this time I am going to speak about it with the Pure Storage FlashArray. Anyone familiar with the VMware Native Multipathing Plugin probably knows about the Round Robin “IOPS” value which I will interchangeably also refer to as the IO Operation Limit. This value dictates how often NMP switches paths to the device–after a configured number of I/Os NMP will move to a different path. The default value of this is 1,000 but can be changed to as low as 1. For the highest performance Pure recommends changing this setting to 1 for all devices. The tricky thing is that it has to be done for every device on every host and doing this in a simple way isn’t immediately obvious. But here is the procedure.

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Firewall requirements for EMC VSI 6.1 for vSphere Web Client

As you might have read on my blog a few days ago, EMC released an updated version of the Virtual Storage Integrator tool for vSphere Web Client that supports direct provisioning and some management of VNX and VMAX storage. The previous version supported ViPR-only provisioning. If you didn’t see that post you can check it out here. Inevitably when a product involves cross-application and importantly cross-server integration many customers ask the question about what are the firewall requirements to get this thing to work? Let’s take a look.

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Virtual Storage Integrator for vSphere Web Client

Today the long-awaited update to Virtual Storage Integrator for the vSphere Web Client as been released! Six months or so ago EMC released the first iteration of the VSI Web Client (version 6.0) that supported provisioning of storage but only for environments enabled with ViPR. The latest release (version 6.1) now adds support for direct provisioning of storage from a VMAX or VNX array.

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The EMC Enterprise Private Cloud 2.0

Increasingly, organizations, small and large, are attempting to or at least considering to implement some type of cloud-based architecture into their IT infrastructure. The benefits of tight integration, intelligent abstraction of resources, seamless automation and orchestration are becoming quite apparent. These benefits and the desire to obtain them are causing customers and partners to look at vendors such as EMC for such a solution. Importantly, a solution that doesn’t require re-invention of the wheel or painstaking initial setup.

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Symmetrix VMAX and Splunk introduction

My colleague Jonas Rosland (@virtualswede) has been doing some great work with Splunk recently (check out a post from his blog here) and it got me to want to get my own hands a little dirty. So far I’ve only scratched the surface on what can be done with Splunk but I decided to put a post together on some basics. For this post I am going to talk about Symmetrix VMAX logs and how to get those into Splunk.

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