Continuing my recent work on learning vRealize Orchestrator and ran into some funkiness with the “Invoke REST host” workflow, that I wanted to write down so I don’t forget how I fixed/worked around it (which I suppose is the impetus for basically every post I do). Anyways, I am working on a REST-based package for the FlashArray and I was using that workflow and had some trouble. Basically, any REST call I made through it to a REST host seemed to fail.
UPDATE: This is a older post, but after working with vRO for longer and learning a lot more about it I decided I needed to re-write this post. Too much of it was not the best way to do things.
One of the projects that I have recently taken up is figuring out how to leverage vRealize Orchestrator to manage and execute operations on the FlashArray. Managing the FlashArray is rather easy of course, most of the work revolved around getting vRO up and running (note in vRO 7.0 all of this is much easier) and learning the product itself and brushing up on my Javascript. I think vRO is a pretty great tool, just takes some time to figure out as not everything in it is quite intuitive, but it seems well ahead of what is was when I last used it a few years back. Once you get the feel of how to leverage it though, you can see how powerful it could be. I’ve just scratched the surface of it and am already excited on what I can put together.
A question came up on our community about a Chrome extension called Advanced REST Client and I had never used it before, so I decided to check it out. Install it here. It will add an extension that allows you to make REST calls to, well whatever from your Chrome browser.
***UPDATE My coworker Barkz did an excellent post about this a few months back too, so check it out too***
Of course there are a billion ways to do this (I traditionally have just used Invoke-RestMethod in PowerShell) but this is another one for your tool arsenal . A quick and easy way to pull REST information from the FlashArray without having to learn another tool like PowerShell to do it.
***********UPDATE PLEASE REFER TO THE POST AT THIS LINK FOR UPDATED INFORMATION ON THIS SCRIPT***********************
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).
Previously I blogged about using PowerShell with the Pure Storage FlashArray to enable scripting of common tasks like provisioning or snapshotting. In that post I showed how to use SSH to run Purity operations, but with the introduction of the REST APIs (fully available in 3.4+) there is now a much better and cleaner way to script this. You no longer need to install extra SSH modules and the like, all you need is the Invoke-RestMethod in PowerShell.
Continue reading “vRealize Orchestrator and Invoke a REST Host Workflow”
