The vSphere Web Client Plugin for the Pure Storage FlashArray has been updated and released and it is the largest update to the plugin since, well, it was first released. A lot of feature enhancements–the majority focused on integrating local and remote replication management into the plugin. Our long term goal is to offer feature parity of FlashArray management with the plugin as compared to our own GUI. It is getting close. Let’s take a look at the new features.
Quick post here. I am working on updating some documentation and I wanted to add a bit more color to a section on changing the IO Operations limit for ESXi NMP Round Robin devices. The Pure Storage recommendation is to change this value to one from the default of 1,000. Therefore, ESXi will switch logical paths after each I/O instead of 1,000. There are some performance benefits to this and some evidence for improved failover time (in the case of a path failure) with this setting. I am not going to get into the veracity of these benefits right now. What I wanted to share here is that there is no doubt changing this to 1 makes a big difference to I/O balance on the array itself. Continue reading “ESXi IO Operations Limit Parameter and IO Balance”
Pure Storage announced last week our very first converged architecture offering appropriately named FlashStack. The initial release of FlashStack is built off of Cisco hardware (UCS of course) and the FlashArray. We have two reference architectures presently, one for VMware Horizon View and one for general purpose VMware vSphere environments (choose your own guest OSes). My colleague Ravi Venkat (@ravivenk) architected the View ref arch, while I focused on the general vSphere one. In this blog post I am going to overview what we did with the vSphere ref arch. For more information on either, refer to the respective reference architecture white papers at the usual place:
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The most common request I get for scripts here at Pure Storage is an UNMAP script using PowerCLI. I have a basic one here that does the trick–UNMAPs Pure Storage volumes in a vCenter. That being said it is pretty dumb–doesn’t tell you much about what happened other than what volumes it is reclaiming (or not reclaiming) and moves on. A few requests have come in recently for something a little more in-depth. Most notably the ability to see how much space has been reclaimed. This information cannot be gathered from the VMware side of things–it has to come from the FlashArray.
There are two options here–either use our REST APIs or use our PowerShell toolkit to get this information (which just wraps the REST calls). For this script I chose to use the REST API directly from within PowerShell. What this script does is:
Connects to the vCenter and FlashArray
Finds all of the datastores and counts how many are actually Pure Storage volumes (NAA comparison)
Iterates through all of the datastores
Skips it if it is not Pure
If it is, the current data reduction ratio is reported and so the is current physical written capacity on the FlashArray.
Runs UNMAP on the datastore
Reports the new data reduction and physical space after UNMAP completes and how much was reclaimed.
Repeats for the rest of the volumes.
The script reports all of this to the console window, but it always throws it in a log file through add-content. If you don’t want it to return the info to the console, simply delete the write-host lines. If you don’t want it to log, delete the add-content lines.
There are a few required parameters–vCenter information (IP, username, password), FlashArray info (IP, username, password), UNMAP block count and a log file location. These are hard-coded parameters, but that can easily be changed by altering it to a read-host.
You may also note that after each UNMAP the script sleeps for 60 seconds–I do this so I make sure the FlashArray has time to update its information right after the UNMAP. 60 seconds is VERY conservative–probably 10 or so is fine, so feel free to mess with that number if you don’t like waiting. I also have another sleep at the end of each datastore operation to give a quick chance to review the latest results before it starts spewing the next datastore information on the screen (note this update didn’t make it into the video demo below–it doesn’t wait after each datastore).
See the script in action below. Essentially I am deleting a bunch of VMs across 4 datastores and then running the UNMAP. You can see the space get reclaimed on the FlashArray.
Note: You need particular access (see a blog post about that here) to vCenter to run UNMAP. For the FlashArray only Read Only is needed (higher of course is fine too).
Reclaiming “dirty” or “dead” space is a topic that goes by my desk quite often these days–since the FlashArray is a data reduction array it is especially important that space is not wasted on the array–throws off the economics etc. Therefore UNMAP is an important VAAI feature to leverage in any AFA environment. Supporting UNMAP is definitely table stakes for AFAs.
Note–I am doing to use the terms “dead”, “dirty” and “stranded” to define space that needs to be reclaimed interchangeably. So anyways…
Unfortunately UNMAP in its current form does not satisfy all of the reclamation use cases. UNMAP will only reclaim space on any array when capacity is cleared from the VMFS volume–so when a VM (or virtual disk) is deleted or migrated elsewhere. It does not have the ability to reclaim space when data is “deleted” inside a virtual machine by the guest OS when using virtual disks. VMware does not know this capacity has been cleared and neither can the array. So until this virtual disk is deleted or moved the capacity cannot be reclaimed with UNMAP. So to be clear, UNMAP with vmkfstools (in ESXi 5.0/5.1) or esxcli (in ESXi 5.5) does not allow you to reclaim space that remains stranded inside of virtual disks.
The other day I stumbled upon a new VMware labs “Fling” called PowerActions. Basically it allows you to run in-context PowerShell/PowerCLI scripts right from within the vSphere Web Client. My mouth drooled at the promise of what this could deliver–and it really delivered! This is my new favorite tool by a landslide. See the announcement here from @alanrenoufhttp://www.virtu-al.net/2014/09/16/powercli-vsphere-web-clientannouncing-poweractions/. I’d recommend readin this first before you continue down with my post.
I have done a few posts on here that involve the Pure Storage Plugin for the vSphere Web Client (here and here) since I joined. Well here is another. We just released a new version of the Web Client Plugin (I am going to refer to it as WCP for the rest of this post because I am a lazy typist). We bundle the WCP into Purity and therefore the WCP is installed, updated and uninstalled from our GUI/CLI to vCenter (yes we do also offer a mechanism to update it outside of upgrading Purity itself). Our latest release of Purity, 4.0.12, includes WCP version 1.1.13–while there is no new functionality there are two important fixes.
The Pure Storage Content Pack for VMware vCenter Log Insight is now live on the VMware Solution Exchange! Download it today for free. As past posts have shown I have done a decent amount of work with Log Insight here at Pure and in my previous job. A product I have really liked from VMware for a variety of reasons, a big one being that it is so very easy to use. We really improved our syslog feature on the FlashArray in the 4.0 Purity release, so it was the perfect time to create our first content pack!
As people are probably aware, VMware just released the slew of new product updates that was announced at VMworld. vSphere 5.5 U2 at the core, but essentially all of the major products had updates–the one in particular interest to me was vCenter Site Recovery Manager. This latest release, numbered 5.8 is probably the biggest update to SRM since probably 5.0 moving to 5.1, arguably bigger. I am still playing around with it, but I wanted to share some of the things I found of interest in it.
Phew another VMworld under my belt! Tons of fun and tons of work! Pure Storage had its largest presence ever at VMworld–we certainly painted Moscone orange in addition to unleashing an arsenal of nerf guns (4,500) upon the city. This post is meant to be more of a photo album of the week and what Pure was involved in–technical posts of things that we did there will be forthcoming.
