Tag: flasharray

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What’s New in vSphere 7.0 U2 Storage: Creating a File Repository on a vVol Datastore

This feature has many names. Creating a larger config vVol. Creating a sub-vVol datastore. Creating an ISO repository. Etc.

In 7.0U2, VMware added a new feature that supports creating a custom size config vVol–while this was technically possible in earlier releases, it was not supported. Also, I should note that this is not supported by all vVol vendors, so of course speak to your vendor first.

First to review what a config vVol is check out this post:

What is a Config VVol Anyways?

In short, it is a mini VMFS that gets created when you create a directory in a vVol datastore (most commonly created by creating a new VM). This defaults to 4 GB in size. Enough to store the general VM files; some logs, VMDK pointers, vmx file, and some other frivolities.

The issue though is that this was not large enough to store large things like ISOs or vib files or whatever. So if you tried to upload something to a vVol datastore folder it would fail with an out-of-space issue. And you cannot upload to the root of a vVol datastore because a vVol datastore is not a file system. So you had to use VMFS or NFS to store those objects.

This is no longer the case.

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Pure Storage Plugin for the vSphere Client 4.5.0 Release

Howdy doody folks. Lots of releases coming down the pipe in short order and the latest is well the latest release of the Pure Storage Plugin for the vSphere Client. This may be our last release of it in this architecture (though we may have one or so more depending on things) in favor of the new preferred client-side architecture that VMware released in 6.7. Details on that here if you are curious.

Anyways, what’s new in this plugin?

The release notes are here:

https://support.purestorage.com/Solutions/VMware_Platform_Guide/Release_Notes_for_VMware_Solutions/Release_Notes%3A_Pure_Storage_Plugin_for_the_vSphere_Client#4.5.0_Release_Notes

But in short, five things:

  1. Improved protection group import wizard. This feature pulls in FlashArray protection groups and converts them into vVol storage policies. This was, rudimentary at best previously, and is now a full-blown, much more flexible wizard.
  2. Native performance charts. Previously performance charts for datastores (where we showed FlashArray performance stats in the vSphere Client) was actually an iframe we pulled from our GUI. This was a poor decision. We have re-done this entirely from the ground up and now pull the stats from the REST API and draw them natively using the Clarity UI. Furthermore, there are now way more stats shown too.
  3. Datastore connectivity management. A few releases ago we added a feature to add an existing datastore to new compute, but it wasn’t particularly flexible and it wasn’t helpful if there were connectivity issues and didn’t provide good insight into what was already connected. We now have an entirely new page that focuses on this.
  4. Host management. This has been entirely revamped. Initially host management was laser focused on one use case: connecting a cluster to a new FlashArray. But no ability to add/remove a host or make adjustments. And like above, no good insight into current configuration. The host and cluster objects now have their own page with extensive controls.
  5. vVol Datastore Summary. This shows some basic information around the vVol datastore object

First off how do you install? The easiest method is PowerShell. See details (and other options) here:

https://support.purestorage.com/Solutions/VMware_Platform_Guide/User_Guides_for_VMware_Solutions/Using_the_Pure_Storage_Plugin_for_the_vSphere_Client/vSphere_Plugin_User_Guide%3A_Installing_the_vSphere_Plugin

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Managing vVol Storage Policies with PowerShell

I just posted about some new cmdlets here:

New vVol Replication PowerShell Cmdlets

Also in that release are a few more cmdlets concerning storage policy creation, editing, and assignment. They were built to make the process easier–the original cmdlets and their use is certainly an option–and for very specific things you might want to do they might be necessary, but the vast majority of common operations can be more easily achieved with these.

As always, to install run:

Install-Module PureStorage.FlashArray.VMware

Or to upgrade:

Update-Module PureStorage.FlashArray.VMware

These modules are open source, so if you just want to use my code or open an RFE or issue go here:

https://github.com/PureStorage-OpenConnect/PureStorage.FlashArray.VMware/

For detailed help on a cmdlet, run Get-Help

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New vVol Replication PowerShell Cmdlets

Happy New Year everyone! Let’s work to make 2021 a better year.

In furtherance of that goal, I have put out a few new vVol-related PowerShell cmdlets! So baby steps I guess.

The following are the new cmdlets:

Basics:

  • Get-PfaVvolStorageArray

Replication:

  • Get-PfaVvolReplicationGroup
  • Get-PfaVvolReplicationGroupPartner
  • Get-PfaVvolFaultDomain

Storage Policy Management:

  • Build-PfaVvolStoragePolicyConfig
  • Edit-PfaVvolStoragePolicy
  • Get-PfaVvolStoragePolicy
  • New-PfaVvolStoragePolicy
  • Set-PfaVvolVmStoragePolicy

Now to walk through how to use them. This post will talk about the basics and the replication cmdlets. The next post will talk about the profile cmdlets.

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SRA 4.0 Released! ActiveDR support

We just released our latest version of our Storage Replication Adapter, version 4.0 for VMware Site Recovery Manager. There are a lot of enhancements in this release and improvements–if you are on 3.1 (or certainly earlier) I recommend an upgrade when you get a chance.

For all the need-to-know information (release notes, user guide, videos, download link, etc.) see here:

https://support.purestorage.com/Solutions/VMware_Platform_Guide/Quick_Reference_by_VMware_Product_and_Integration/Site_Recovery_Manager_Quick_Reference

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Disk.DiskMaxIOSize and the Blue Screen of Death

While the title of this post does sound like a halfway decent Harry Potter novel, this is far more nefarious. Pure Storage, like many other vendors have a best practice around lowering the Disk.DiskMaxIOSize setting on ESXi hosts when using UEFI boot for your Windows VMs. Why? Well:

Yes not having it set in a few situations would cause BSOD. First off, why?

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What’s New in Purity 6.0: ActiveDR

I have already posted about ActiveDR briefly here:

Pure Storage Data Protection Part II: FlashArray Replication Options

I wanted to go into more detail on ActiveDR (and more) in a “What’s New” series. One of the flagship features of the Purity 6.0 release is what we call ActiveDR. ActiveDR is a continuous replication feature–meaning it sends the new data over to the secondary array as quickly as it can–it does not wait for an interval to replicate.

For the TL;DR, here is a video tech preview demo of the upcoming SRM integration as well as setup of ActiveDR itself

But ActiveDR is much more than just data replication is protects your storage environment. Let me explain what that means.

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Default FlashArray Connection With PowerShell

In the VMware Pure PowerShell module (PureStorage.FlashArray.VMware) there is a default array connection stored in a global variable called $Global:DefaultFlashArray and all connected FlashArrays in $Global:AllFlashArrays. The VMware/Pure PowerShell module automatically uses what is in the “default” variable.

The underlying “core” Pure Storage PowerShell module (PureStoragePowerShellSDK) does not yet take advantage of global connections. So for each cmdlet you run, you must pass in the “array” parameter. For example to get all of the volumes from an array:

Kind of annoying if you are interactively running commands and only have one array connection you care about (or one that you primarily care about).

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Testing New SRA Release with a 2nd SRM Pair

At the time of writing this post we are currently at work on our next release of our Storage Replication Adapter for the FlashArray. In a discussion with a customer who needs the feature that we are adding (what a nice coincidence!) the question came up, “what is the best way to test?”. They want to test the SRA without fouling up their production SRM environment.

So a simple answer is well deploy two new vCenters and a SRM pair. But that requires certain hosts and similar network configuration and authentication, etc. etc. So they wanted to use their existing vCenters but NOT their existing SRM servers.

SRM used to be a fairly rigid tool (for good reason, let’s not break your DR). But in the past few years VMware has really opened it up. Loosened the tight vCenter version to SRM version, shared recovery sites, and multiple SRM pairs per vCenter pair. This is where we come in.

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