Tag: flasharray

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Pure Storage Python Toolkit Intro with Windows

Most of my scripting work here at Pure Storage has mostly been via PowerShell or at times Javascript (for like vRO). But I think it is time to get back into Python especially because of the VMware support for it now.

Pure Storage has an automation toolkit that helps get you started managing the FlashArray so you don’t have to deal with the direct REST work in your Python scripts. You can find information about that here:

http://pythonhosted.org/purestorage/index.html

Continue reading “Pure Storage Python Toolkit Intro with Windows”

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Protection Group Recovery in PowerShell

Awhile back I wrote about performing an operation introduced in Purity 4.6 called protection group copy, which I really referred to as protection group recovery, which I think is maybe a more apt title.

Anyways, this feature is available in our REST API and our CLI (not yet in our GUI in a direct format) but is not yet built into our PowerShell SDK.  I have seen more than one request for information on how to do this, and it certainly can be done without our official SDK and this is through the good ol’ Invoke-RestMethod cmdlet built into PowerShell. I’ve spoken about using this many times, here and here.

Let’s walk through it specifically with protection group restore.

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FlashArray Host Group Creation PowerShell Script for VMware Clusters

New script to automatically create hosts groups on FlashArrays based on VMware ESXi clusters. This is a script I’ve had out for awhile but only recently revisited and realized it was way out of date and frankly, not very good. So I trashed most of it and re-wrote it. You can find it here:

https://github.com/codyhosterman/powercli/blob/master/createhostgroups.ps1

It is pretty self-explanatory I suppose, but it’s good to review the finer points before you run it. Continue reading “FlashArray Host Group Creation PowerShell Script for VMware Clusters”

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FlashArray VMware Best Practices PowerCLI Scripts

I wrote a post recently on the updates made to the PowerCLI 6.3 R1 esxcli implementation, so the logical next step was to implement this new behavior into my PowerCLI scripts that use esxcli. I still have a few scripts to update, but my two best practice-related scripts are ready to go. The two scripts are:

  1. Script to check and set best practices. Download here:
  2. Script to just check best practices, and lists issues in a report. Download here.

While I was updating them for esxcli changes, I figured i might as well improve them too, so there are quite a few changes for both. Let’s take a look.

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FlashArray Deprecation of TLS 1.0 Support and the vSphere Web Client Plugin

In the recent release of the Purity Operating Environment on the FlashArray we deprecated TLS 1.0 support due to the ever growing list of vulnerabilities in it. Communication will be restricted to TLS 1.1 and later. Unfortunately, this affects some plugins/integrations. This is not an exhaustive list, but related to the ones VMware customers probably touch the most. If something is not listed ping the relevant support organization for more information.

The following plugins are NOT affected and will continue to work with Purity 4.7:

  • vRealize Operations Management Pack
  • vRealize Orchestrator Workflow Package
  • vRealize Log Insight Content Pack

The following are affected and will need to be upgraded to a specific version to work with Purity 4.7:

  • Site Recovery Manager Storage Replication Adapter (this needs to be version 1.5, which will be out soon)
  • vSphere Web Client Plugin (this needs to be version 2.0.10+)
  • VSS Provider (this needs to be version 1.0.2)
  • PowerShell SDK (this needs to be version 1.5)

Continue reading “FlashArray Deprecation of TLS 1.0 Support and the vSphere Web Client Plugin”

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VMFS Snapshots and the FlashArray Part V: How to snapshot a VMFS on the FlashArray

This is part 5 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 V: How to snapshot a VMFS on the FlashArray”

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Introducing FlashArray Purity Release 4.6

It has been awhile since I have done a solely Purity operating environment post and with the recent release of our Purity 4.6 operating environment I thought it was a good opportunity to do one. I will overview some new features and changes, some big some small.

4.6 has been in Directed Availability (DA) for some time, so many of you might already have this, but I decided to wait until it was closer to GA (this is imminent) to post. Not a gigantic release, but I think there is some cool stuff in it regardless.

Here is a brief listing of some of the new stuff:

NEW FEATURES

  • VLAN tagging Introduces support for VLAN tagging for iSCSI connections to the FlashArray. VLAN tagging allows multiple VLAN interfaces to be configured on physical iSCSI ports.
  • Replication network bandwidth throttling Introduces the ability to set a maximum network bandwidth utilization for replication between two connected arrays. Allows configuration of a default maximum bandwidth and/or a time window during which a different maximum bandwidth is enforced.
  • Deduplication-preserving replication Introduces the ability for Purity to preserve inline deduplication savings when transferring replication data to a target array, to reduce the network bandwidth utilization.
  • Protection group copy Introduces the ability to copy protection groups, including their member hosts, volumes, and snapshots. Protection group copy is supported in the CLI and REST API.
  • The Pure Storage SMI-S Provider Release 1.0.0 of the Pure Storage SMI-S provider is embedded in Purity 4.6.0 release. SMI-S enables both hardware and software interoperability between different vendors’ enterprise storage products and allows vendors to develop to a single standard interface. For more information, please see the SMIS-S release notes.
  • Improved readability of graphs in the Purity GUI In the GUI Dashboard and Analysis tabs, changes the color of the write graph to orange to distinguish it from the blue read graph.
  • CLI Changes This is mostly to cover the new features above
  • REST API version 1.5 Some new REST calls for new features and general enhancements and fixes for our REST API service.

Continue reading “Introducing FlashArray Purity Release 4.6”