Tag: flasharray

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ESXi and the Missing LUNs: 256 or Higher

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.

Continue reading “ESXi and the Missing LUNs: 256 or Higher”

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Importing a VVol Snapshot with PowerCLI

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:

Continue reading “Importing a VVol Snapshot with PowerCLI”

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Multi-site FlashArray Configuration with Site Recovery Manager

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”

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Documentation Update, Best Practices and vRealize

So a few updates. I just updated my vSphere Best Practices guide and it can be found here:

Download Best Practices Guide PDF

I normally do not create a blog post about updating the guide, but this one was a major overhaul and I think is worth mentioning. Furthermore, there are a few documents I have written and published that I want to mention.

  1. FlashArray Plugin for vRealize Orchestrator User Guide
  2. Implementing FlashArray in a vRealize Private Cloud

Continue reading “Documentation Update, Best Practices and vRealize”

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In-Guest UNMAP Fix in ESXi 6.5 Part II: Linux

This is the second part of this post. In the first post, I explained the fix and how it affected Windows. In this post, we will overview how the change affects Linux-based virtual machines. See the original post here:

In-Guest UNMAP Fix in ESXi 6.5 Part I: Windows

I posted about In-Guest UNMAP with Linux VMs in this post:

What’s new in ESXi 6.5 Storage Part I: UNMAP

One thing you can note is that automatic UNMAP works quite well, but manual UNMAP, like fstrim did not. So let’s revisit fstrim now that this patch is out. Continue reading “In-Guest UNMAP Fix in ESXi 6.5 Part II: Linux”

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In-Guest UNMAP Fix in ESXi 6.5 Part I: Windows

As you might’ve seen, Cormac Hogan just posted about an UNMAP fix that was just released. This is a fix I have been eagerly awaiting for some time, so I am very happy to see it released. And thankfully it does not disappoint.

First off, some official information:

Release notes:

https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2148989

Manual patch download:

https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/patch#search

Or you can run esxcli if you ESXi host has internet access to download and install automatically:

esxcli software profile update -p ESXi-6.5.0-20170304001-standard -d https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml

Continue reading “In-Guest UNMAP Fix in ESXi 6.5 Part I: Windows”

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Understanding VMware ESXi Queuing and the FlashArray

So I am in the middle of updating my best practices guide for vSphere on FlashArray and one of the topics I am looking into providing better guidance around is ESXi queue management. This breaks down to a few things:

  • Array volume queue depth limit
  • Datastore queue depth limit
  • Virtual Machine vSCSI Adapter queue depth limit
  • Virtual Disk queue depth limit

I have had more than a few questions lately about handling this–either just general queries or performance escalations. And generally from what I have found it comes down to fundamental understanding of how ESXi queuing works. And how the FlashArray plays with it. So I put a blog post together of a use case and walking through solving a performance problem. Explaining concepts along the way.

Please note:

  • This is a simple example to explain how queuing works in ESXi
  • Mileage will vary depending on your workload and configuration
  • This workload is targeted specifically to make relationships easier to understand
  • PLEASE do not make changes in your environment at least until you read my conclusion at the end. And frankly not without direct guidance from VMware support.

I am sorry, this is a long one. But hopefully informative!

If you prefer a video, here is my 1 hr VMworld session that goes into depth on what I write below:

Continue reading “Understanding VMware ESXi Queuing and the FlashArray”

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Introducing the FlashArray Plugin for vRealize Orchestrator v1.0

This is a blog I have been waiting a long time to write. The past year and a half of my work has heavily focused on improving and building our VMware vRealize integration at Pure Storage. Log Insight and Operations Manager integration already existed (analytics etc.), so the next logical step is actually provisioning (orchestration). So vRealize Orchestrator and Automation. The first step I took was using the built-in REST plugin in vRO to build a workflow package that customers could use to actually manage the FlashArray without much work on their own part inside of vRO.

I started to realize that a workflow package was not enough. Especially when it comes to vRA Anything-As-A-Service integration. A big part of what is missing from a workflow package is custom objects and inventory management. Something that a plugin can easily achieve. So, without further ado–please meet the FlashArray vRO plugin! Downloadable at the VMware Solution Exchange and fully certified by VMware and Pure Storage:

FlashArray vRO Download

My vRO plugin white paper Continue reading “Introducing the FlashArray Plugin for vRealize Orchestrator v1.0”

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VMFS Snapshots and the FlashArray Part VII: Restoring a VM

This is part 7 of this 7 part series. Questions around managing VMFS snapshots have been cropping up a lot lately and I realized I didn’t have a lot of specific Pure Storage and VMware resignaturing information out there. Especially around scripting all of this and the various options to do this. So I put a long series out here about how to do all of this.

The series being:

  1. Mounting an unresolved VMFS
  2. Why not force mount?
  3. Why might a VMFS resignature operation fail?
  4. How to correlate a VMFS and a FlashArray volume
  5. How to snapshot a VMFS on the FlashArray
  6. How to mount a VMFS FlashArray snapshot
  7. Restoring a single VM from a FlashArray snapshot

Continue reading “VMFS Snapshots and the FlashArray Part VII: Restoring a VM”

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PowerShell GUI VMware and FlashArray Storage Management Tool

Here is my storage manager for the FlashArray and VMware. Based on PowerCLI, but uses a front end GUI. Enjoy!

NOTICE THIS HAS BEEN DEPRECATED IN FAVOR OF THE POWERSHELL MODULE HERE:
https://www.codyhosterman.com/scripts-and-tools/pure-storage-powershell-vmware-module/

There are a variety of methods of managing VMware objects (VMFS volumes, VMs, VMDKs and RDMs) and the underlying snapshots to recovery or clone them. But often I get asked if I have a PowerShell (PowerCLI) script to do one or all of them. I have a bunch on my GitHub, but I decided a week or so ago to put something a bit more robust together. At first I was making it a standard interactive script, but it morphed into a GUI, using combo-boxes etc:

Continue reading “PowerShell GUI VMware and FlashArray Storage Management Tool”