"Remember kids, the only difference between Science and screwing around is writing it down" -Alex Jason (made popular by Adam Savage)
In Purity 5.0 Pure Storage released support for Active/Active replication on the FlashArray. This provides the ability to present the same storage volume simultaneously from two different FlashArrays.
For a good overview, check out this video:
Continue reading “Setting Up FlashArray Active/Active Replication (ActiveCluster)”
Amidst writing a vMSC guide for our newly-introduced Active-Active replication called ActiveCluster, I have been taking some breaks to finish my vRealize Orchestrator Workflow Package for Virtual Volumes. I posted a starter post recently:
Getting Started with vRealize Orchestrator and VVols
I am almost done with v1, but until then another starter post. Continue reading “Assigning a VVol VM Storage Policy with vRO”
This is a blog post I have been waiting to write for a long time. We at Pure Storage are pleased to announce that vSphere Virtual Volume support on the FlashArray is officially GA!
The FlashArray now supports running VVols in Purity 5.0.0 and later. The cool thing about the FlashArray is the flexibility of the Purity Operating Environment–so VVols are supported on all FA 400 models (405, 420, and 450), //M models (m10, m20, m50, m70) and FlashArray//X. Continue reading “Announcing Pure Storage FlashArray VVol GA”
Over the past few weeks, I have been working on writing a vRealize Orchestrator workflow package for Virtual Volumes and the FlashArray. While that is not quite ready to go out, I think some basics for starting to use vRO and VVols are worth noting.
There are three main parts of using VVols with vRO:
Continue reading “Getting Started with vRealize Orchestrator and VVols”
So one of our field engineers reached out to me because they had a power outage of some sort and their vCenter appliance failed to boot with these errors about starting up the services.
So this is a common that has happened many times as seen from these KBs and community posts:
Etc. Etc.
Simple blog post, and this is really more for my own future reference. But could help you if you don’t have the common mount problems in the forums etc.
I have been traveling around lately talking about VVols and one of the most commonly misunderstood objects is the VVol datastore. What is it? What does capacity mean on it? Why does it even exist?
These are all good questions. The great thing about VVols is that very little changes in how the VMware user interacts with vSphere. But at the same time, what actual happens is VERY different. So let’s work through this.
Having consistent LUN IDs for volumes in ESXi has historically been a gotcha–though over time this requirement went away.
For example:
These days, the need for consistent LUN IDs is mainly gone. The lingering use case for this is Microsoft Clustering and how persistent SCSI reservations are handled. The below KB doesn’t mention 6.5, but I believe it to still be relevant to 6.5:
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2054897 Continue reading “Issue with Consistent LUN ID in ESXi 6.5”
This is the start of many blog posts around the recent Purity 5.0 release. I figured I would start with one that doesn’t require an upgrade of Purity to even get!
Alongside Purity 5.0, we released the 3.0 version of theFlashArray plugin for the vSphere Web Client. This is bundled in Purity 5.0, so if you upgrade any one of your FlashArrays you can then use it to upgrade the plugin in one or all of your vCenters.
Let me be clear though–if you want to use VVols or ActiveCluster you need Purity 5.0. Without Purity 5.0, you can use the 3.0 plugin of course, but you can only use non-VVol or non-ActiveCluster features.
Continue reading “FlashArray 3.0 Plugin for the vSphere Web Client”
A new ESXi 6.5 patch came out today:
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2151104
And I wanted to upgrade my whole lab environment to it and I haven’t set up auto-deploy or update manager yet (I plan to, making all of this much easier to manage). So I wrote a quick and dirty PowerCLI script that updates to the latest patch and if the host doesn’t have any VMs on it, puts it into maintenance mode and reboots it. I will reboot the other ones as needed.
So short, not really even worth throwing on GitHub, but I might make it cleaner, and smarter at some point and put it there. Continue reading “Upgrading ESXi environment with PowerCLI”
Ah, VVols. The VMFS Datastore killer. And very soon, the RDM killer.
Virtual Volumes (VVols) is a spec from VMware that allows storage vendors implement virtual disks as they see fit. On FlashArray, we’ve implemented VVols virtual disks as just regular volumes on the array.
Think about what that means for a second.
It means that you now get virtual disk granularity of VMs for not only data services on the array, like snapshots, and clones – but you also get virtual disk granularity for replication. You’re no longer forced to snapshot/clone/replicate entire datastores, or dealing with pesky, slow SCSI bus rescans and even more painful datastore resignature operations.
For a technical introduction to VVols, go ahead and watch this playlist with videos from my coworker and VMware extraordinaire, Cody Hosterman. Keep reading after for a discussion on running SQL Server workloads on VVols.
Done with the videos? Cool. If not, make sure you watch them later – they have the best explanation of how VVols work that I’ve seen out there. And even if you don’t use FlashArray, the explanation and concepts apply (mostly) the same.
Did I scare you with the title? Sorry, that was meant to throw you off.
Repeat after me: VVOLS SHOULD BE YOUR FIRST CHOICE FOR VIRTUALIZING SQL SERVER ON TOP OF VMWARE VSPHERE, PERIOD.
With VVols, you maintain the performance of an RDM with the agility of a VMDK. No more worrying about thin vs eager zero thick or any of that nonsense!.
Moving between physical volumes, RDMs and VVols is extremely straightforward on FlashArray. A move to VVols from VMFS basically entails a simple storage vMotion, which on FlashArray is an array deferred, metadata-only operation. Since FlashArray is a data reducing array, a storage vMotion from VMFS to VVols is just a VAAI XCOPY operation. Your new “copy” will only consume a little bit of space for the metadata, and nothing else. An RDM to VVols migration is also pretty straightforward, and there’s no VMFS datastore “container” to worry about. It’s exactly the same layout on the array, whether you go physical, RDM, or VVols. And you’re not “stuck” with VVols once you make the decision to go down that route for a given virtual disk. If you need to go back to VMFS, just storage vMotion it back, simple as that.
There is only one scenario where you can’t quite use VVols for SQL Server, and that’s when you have shared storage between SQL Server instances, which is the case for Failover Cluster Instances (FCI), which you probably just call “clusters” and VMware keeps calling “MSCS” (for Microsoft Cluster Server), which is nomenclature from 2003, feels like 1989, and no one should be using anymore.
However, there’s good news on that front! VMware will support SCSI-3 reservations on VVols starting with version 6.7, which is in beta right now from VMware. Go ahead and read Eric Seibert’s blog post on VVols futures for more information on that. At that point, I don’t want any of you even mentioning VMFS to me, unless you’re running a version of vSphere prior to 6.5 (which is our requirement for VVols). But quite honestly, VVols is a pretty compelling reason to upgrade to 6.5, or 6.7 when it comes out!
My coworker and former (should I say recovering?) Oracle DBA Somu Rajarathinam wrote a great post on Oracle database cloning with VVols and FlashArray. Rather than me just translating that post to SQL Server lingo, I’ll just link to it here and let you enjoy. The concepts on SQL Server are extremely similar so just picture in your head what that would look like.
That’s it for this post, but let’s be sure to continue the conversation on Twitter by mentioning me (@DBArgenis), Cody (@codyhosterman) or just using the hashtag #PureStorage.
Thanks for reading,
-A