Tag: flasharray

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VMFS Snapshots and the FlashArray Part VI: Mounting a FlashArray VMFS Snapshot

This is part 6 of this 8 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

Using vCenter and our Web Client plugin, recovering a snapshot is a pretty straight forward process. So the pre-requisite here is having our Web Client plugin installed and configured. Info on that here. If you want to know the manual steps, scroll down further and the whole process is described in detail that does not use the plugin–just our GUI and vCenter. Continue reading “VMFS Snapshots and the FlashArray Part VI: Mounting a FlashArray VMFS Snapshot”

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Detecting what FlashArray VMFS Volumes Have Dead Space

Another UNMAP post, are you shocked? A common question that came up was what volumes have dead space? What datastores should I run UNMAP on?

My usual response was, well it is hard to say. Dead space is introduced when you move a VM or you delete one. The array will not release the space until you either delete the physical volume, overwrite it, or issue UNMAP. Until vSphere 6.5, UNMAP for VMFS was not automatic. You had to run a CLI command to do it. So that leads back to the question, well I have 100 datastores, which ones should I run it on?

So to find out, you need to know two things:

  1. How much space the file system reports as currently being used.
  2. How much space the array is physically storing for the volume hosting that file system.

Continue reading “Detecting what FlashArray VMFS Volumes Have Dead Space”

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VMFS Capacity Monitoring in a Data Reducing World

A question recently came up on the Pure Storage Community Forum about VMFS capacity alerts that said, to paraphrase:

“I am constantly getting capacity threshold (75%) alerts on my VMFS volumes but when I look at my FlashArray volume used capacity it is nowhere near that in used space. What can I do to make the VMware number closer to the FlashArray one so I don’t get these alerts?”

This comment really boils down to what is the difference between these numbers and how do I handle it? So, let’s dig into this. Continue reading “VMFS Capacity Monitoring in a Data Reducing World”

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1.7 Release of the FlashArray Workflow Package for vRealize Orchestrator

Finally starting to catch up on work after VMworld. A lot of blog posts queued up in my head that I want to start getting out. Here is the first. I have completed an update of the FlashArray workflow package with some bug fixes and some new workflows. As always the workflow package can be found here:

https://github.com/codyhosterman/orchestrator/blob/master/com.purestorage.codyhosterman.package

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Continue reading “1.7 Release of the FlashArray Workflow Package for vRealize Orchestrator”

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VMFS UNMAP switches block count

A recent question I got about my UNMAP PowerCLI script was it says it was using a certain block count but when I looked at the log it was using 200. Why?

Well I blogged before about why a given UNMAP process might revert to the default block count of 200 here. Essentially, if you indicate a block count larger than 1% of the free space of the VMFS ESXi will revert it to 200. Or if the VMFS is more than 75% full it will always override the block count back down to 200. Continue reading “VMFS UNMAP switches block count”

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vRealize Orchestrator, TLS 1.2 and Certificate Importing

As I have blogged about before, TLS 1.0 and SSL v3 were deprecated in Purity 4.7, requiring all connections to use either TLS 1.1 or TLS 1.2. This affected a variety of integrations, some we updated, some you just had to alter their behavior. A few VMware products do not/did not use TLS 1.1/1.2 by default, so they either need to altered or upgraded. This almost invariably boiled down to the JDK version that was in use. vRealize Orchestrator is no exception.

vcologo

Continue reading “vRealize Orchestrator, TLS 1.2 and Certificate Importing”

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Running UNMAP with vRealize Orchestrator

Let me start out with saying I’m embarrassed I have only been using vRO for 8 months or so. It is AWESOME.

The FlashArray Workflow Package for vRealize Orchestrator has been updated to include two new objects:

  1. Auto-expand datastore policy template
  2. Workflow to run UNMAP on a datastore

The creation of the first part is explained in this post. But if you are using the FlashArray it is all built into the package, so you have to do very little work. I’ll explain in a bit.

The UNMAP workflow is generic–it can be used with any VMFS datastore that supports UNMAP. So it is included in the workflow package and it is also standalone for those of you who don’t have a FlashArray. You can get the standalone here:

https://github.com/codyhosterman/orchestrator/blob/master/vmfsunmap.workflow

Continue reading “Running UNMAP with vRealize Orchestrator”

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Automatic VMFS expansion with vCenter SNMP and vRealize Orchestrator

Virtual disk oversubscription is becoming increasingly common and so is allowing people to provision their own VMs. So increasing a datastore capacity is also an increasingly common operation. Because of the performance of flash, merged with ESXi features like VAAI ATS. Expanding a VMFS is easy. Expanding a storage volume these days is easy. But you still have to actually do it. What if I want to automate the process to respond to datastore capacity threshold limits? There are a variety of ways to achieve this. Let’s look at it via vCenter SNMP alerts and vRealize Orchestrator workflows. Continue reading “Automatic VMFS expansion with vCenter SNMP and vRealize Orchestrator”

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Deeper detail on using parameters with the FlashArray Python toolkit

Last week I posted about getting started with the Python toolkit, now I wanted to go a little deeper today on using the toolkit beyond connecting/creating a volume. A question I have seen more than once is:

“okay, I understand connecting and getting basic information, but what if I want to pull statistics or more advanced information from the array besides what the default commands? The API glossary for the toolkit doesn’t say explicitly how I can get the information I want”

In short, just because the Python glossary doesn’t explicitly say how to do something or even if you can, it does not mean you can’t. It really depends on what the REST API can do.

Let me explain.

Continue reading “Deeper detail on using parameters with the FlashArray Python toolkit”