One of the changes in VMware vSphere PowerCLI 6.3 R1 was a much needed one: how the arguments are managed with esxcli commands. This was always a bit of a pain, especially for commands that have a lot of arguments. I won’t go into the detail on all of why/what of the changes here, as Alan Renouf already did that quite well here. So if you are unsure of the previous ugliness of esxcli in PowerCLI read that post before reading more here. Otherwise, continue on. I want to talk about some specific examples for storage-related commands that I use and many of our customers use quite commonly.
Changing an ESXi SATP Rule
One of the few hard requirements we make to configure best practices on ESXi for the FlashArray is to create a SATP rule. A SATP rule simply describes a certain configuration (mainly around multipathing) for a specific set of devices (usually devices from an array). For the FlashArray, this rule consists of making sure devices are using Round Robin and an I/O operations limit of 1.
esxcli storage nmp satp rule add -s VMW_SATP_ALUA -V PURE -M FlashArray -P “VMW_PSP_RR” -O iops=1 -e “FlashArray SATP Rule”
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.
