"Remember kids, the only difference between Science and screwing around is writing it down" -Alex Jason (made popular by Adam Savage)
I see a fair amount of requests around how to do different things with VMware PowerCLI and the Pure Storage PowerShell SDK. How do I correlate a VMFS to a volume? How do I create a new VMFS? How do I expand? Etc.
To help our customers I have written a module that includes a lot of the common operations people might need to “connect” PowerCLI to our PowerShell SDK.
The module is called Cody.PureStorage.FlashArray.VMware. Continue reading “Pure Storage and VMware PowerShell Module”
I am working on my PowerShell module for Pure/VMware operations and one of the cmdlets I am writing is for growing a VMFS. When perusing the internet, I could not find a lot of direct information on how to actually do this. There is not a default cmdlet for doing this.
The illustrious Luc Dekens talks about this problem here and even provides a great module for doing this:
If you just need want to run a quick script you can use that. If you want to write it yourself here is a quick overview of what you need to do. I am talking about a specific use case of:
My last post in this series was about getting a VVol UUID and figuring out what volume on a FlashArray it is. But what about the step before that? If I have a guest OS file system how do I even figure out what VMDK it is?
There is a basic option, which can potentially be used, which is correlating the bus ID and the unit ID of the device in the guest and matching it to what VMware displays for the virtual disks.
But that always felt to me as somewhat inexact. What if you accidentally look at the wrong VM object and then do something to a volume you do not mean to? Or the opposite?
Not ideal. Luckily there is a more exact approach. I will focus this particular post on Windows. I will look at Linux in an upcoming one.
Continue reading “PowerCLI and VVols Part IV: Correlating a Windows NTFS to a VMDK”
One of the great benefits of vVols is that fact that virtual disks are just volumes on your array. So this means if you want to do some data management with your virtual disks, you just need to work directly on the volume that corresponds to it.
The question is what virtual disk corresponds to what volume on what array?
Well some of that question is very array dependent (are you using Pure Storage or something else). But the first steps are always the same. Let’s start there for the good of the order.
There are a variety of ways to assign and set a SPBM Policy to a VM. I recently put out a workflow package for vRO to everything VVols and Pure:
vRealize Orchestrator VVol Workflow Package
I also specifically blogged about assigning a policy to a VM with vRO:
Assigning a VVol VM Storage Policy with vRO
How do you do this with PowerCLI?
Continue reading “PowerCLI and VVols Part I: Assigning a SPBM Policy”
One of our continuing goals at Pure Storage is to simplify your life (when it comes to storage and VMware of course, your personal life is your own thing). So as much as possible, we try to reduce the number of things to set in vSphere to “work” better with the FlashArray. We don’t have configuration options on the array, so if we require you to make some kind of settings change on a host that is opened up as a bug internally at Pure: can we make the array respond/behave in a way that the change isn’t necessary?
As of the latest releases of vSphere (in 6.0 and in 6.5) our multipathing best practices are default (Round Robin and IO Operations Limit of 1). So one less thing.
Though there are a few things depending on your environment that need/should be set. Many of these are by default set correctly, so we merely check for those. A few still however need to be changed.
I have updated my blog post here:
FlashArray VMware Best Practices PowerCLI Scripts
See that for details.
Highlights are:
Enjoy!
A new ESXi 6.5 patch came out today:
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2151104
And I wanted to upgrade my whole lab environment to it and I haven’t set up auto-deploy or update manager yet (I plan to, making all of this much easier to manage). So I wrote a quick and dirty PowerCLI script that updates to the latest patch and if the host doesn’t have any VMs on it, puts it into maintenance mode and reboots it. I will reboot the other ones as needed.
So short, not really even worth throwing on GitHub, but I might make it cleaner, and smarter at some point and put it there. Continue reading “Upgrading ESXi environment with PowerCLI”
Quick post. I updated my PowerShell GUI tool I maintain for VMware and FlashArray management and added some new features. This time mainly around protection group management. Download it from my GitHub page here:
https://github.com/codyhosterman/powercli/blob/master/PureStorageVMwareStorageTool.ps1
Continue reading “VMware and FlashArray PowerShell GUI tool v2.7”
I updated my UNMAP PowerCLI script a month or so ago and improved quite a few things–but I did remove hard-coded variables and replaced it with interactive input. Which is fine for some, but for many it was not.
Note: Move to VMFS-6 in vSphere 6.5 and you don’t have to worry about this UNMAP business anymore 🙂
Essentially, quite a few people want to run it as a scheduled task in Windows, and if it requires input that just isn’t going to work out of the box. So I have created an unattended version of the script. For details read on.
Note: I will continue to update the script (bugs, features, etc.) but will note them on my other blog post about the script here:
Pure Storage FlashArray UNMAP PowerCLI Script for VMware ESXi
I will only update this post if the unattended version changes in a way that makes these instructions wrong. Continue reading “Unattended VMFS UNMAP Script”
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:
