"Remember kids, the only difference between Science and screwing around is writing it down" -Alex Jason (made popular by Adam Savage)
I posted a few months back about ESXi queue depth limits and how it affects performance. Just recently, Pure Storage announced our upcoming support for vSphere Virtual Volumes. So, this begs the question, what changes with VVols when it comes to queuing? In a certain view, a lot. But conceptually, actually very little. Let’s dig into this a bit more. 
Continue reading “Queue Depth Limits and VVol Protocol Endpoints”
This is a blog post I have been waiting to write for quite some time. I cannot even remember exactly how long ago I saw Satyam Vaghani present on this as a concept at VMworld. Back when the concept of what is now called a protocol endpoint (more on that later) was called an I/O Demultiplexer. A mouthful for sure. Finally it’s time! With pleasure, I’d like to introduce VVols on the FlashArray!
Continue reading “Introducing vSphere Virtual Volumes on the FlashArray”
Quick post. I had the pleasure and honor of being invited back to the vSpeaking Podcast hosted by Pete Flecha and John Nicholson to talk about vRealize Automation use cases. Alongside me was Aaron Patten of Solidfire to discuss the same topic.
Continue reading “vSpeaking Podcast Guest Spot on vRealize Automation”
It is that time of year again! Eric Siebert at vSphereland has released the annual Top vBlog voting which can be found here:
http://vsphere-land.com/news/voting-now-open-for-top-vblog-2017.html
So over the past two years or so I have been talking up vRealize Orchestrator quite a bit. And a fair amount of that conversation was based on the eventual usage of vRealize Automation. While I certainly feel vRA is a GREAT use case for vRO, the usefulness of vRO does not in any way require vRA.
A common question I get is, “hey can you add this feature to the official FlashArray Plugin?”. The answer is often “maybe” or “eventually” but sometimes even “no”. The plugin is centered at the satisfying the majority and therefore sometimes does not exactly meet your requirements.
So with these two things in mind, what is the connection? Well, using vRO (which is FREE when you have vCenter) you can easily build your own. Especially when you install the FlashArray vRO plugin.
I see a couple advantages here:
Continue reading “Building your own Web Client Plugin with vRO”
A customer pinged me the other day and said they could not see a volume on their ESXi host. Running ESXi version 6.5. All of the normal stuff checked out, but the volume was nowhere to be seen. What gives? Well it turned out to be the LUN ID was over 255 and ESXi couldn’t see it. Let me explain.
The TLDR is ESXi does not support LUN IDs above 255 for your average device.
UPDATE (8/15/2017) I have been meaning to update this post for awhile. Here are the rules:
ESXi 6.5 does support LUN ID higher than 255, but only if those addresses are configured using peripheral LUN addressing. If your array uses flat addressing, it will not work (which is common for higher level LUN IDs).
ESXi 6.7 does now support flat LUN addressing so this problem goes away entirely.
See this post for more information on ESXi 6.7 flat support.
*It’s not actually aliens, it is perfectly normal SCSI you silly man.
I updated my UNMAP PowerCLI script a month or so ago and improved quite a few things–but I did remove hard-coded variables and replaced it with interactive input. Which is fine for some, but for many it was not.
Note: Move to VMFS-6 in vSphere 6.5 and you don’t have to worry about this UNMAP business anymore 🙂
Essentially, quite a few people want to run it as a scheduled task in Windows, and if it requires input that just isn’t going to work out of the box. So I have created an unattended version of the script. For details read on.
Note: I will continue to update the script (bugs, features, etc.) but will note them on my other blog post about the script here:
Pure Storage FlashArray UNMAP PowerCLI Script for VMware ESXi
I will only update this post if the unattended version changes in a way that makes these instructions wrong. Continue reading “Unattended VMFS UNMAP Script”
This is all very exciting for me, finally able to really start blogging about VVols in earnest. As you may or may not be aware we (Pure Storage) currently have our VVol implementation in beta. So I can finally start digging into some VVol work. Not going to get into implementation details just yet, but instead a quick walkthrough of importing a VVol snapshot with PowerCLI.
First, enjoy a poorly photoshopped Back To the Future reference:
The FlashArray Storage Replication Adapter for VMware Site Recovery Manager supports many:many replication since the 2.0 release of the SRA. Use of test failover, failover and reprotect is no different than with 1:1, and nor is the setup of the volumes. The only real difference is how you configure the array managers in SRM. So let’s review how this is done.
Continue reading “Multi-site FlashArray Configuration with Site Recovery Manager”
Hey all! We have a new position that has opened up at Pure Storage for a Solutions Architect that will be focused on virtualization and automation. Apply here:
https://boards.greenhouse.io/purestorage/jobs/651394
So that is the job posting, but let me talk in more detail about what it entails.
Continue reading “Hiring! Looking for a Virtualization/Automation focused Solutions Architect”