"Remember kids, the only difference between Science and screwing around is writing it down" -Alex Jason (made popular by Adam Savage)
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:
This is part 7 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:
Continue reading “VMFS Snapshots and the FlashArray Part VII: Restoring a VM”
Here is my storage manager for the FlashArray and VMware. Based on PowerCLI, but uses a front end GUI. Enjoy!
NOTICE THIS HAS BEEN DEPRECATED IN FAVOR OF THE POWERSHELL MODULE HERE:
https://www.codyhosterman.com/scripts-and-tools/pure-storage-powershell-vmware-module/
There are a variety of methods of managing VMware objects (VMFS volumes, VMs, VMDKs and RDMs) and the underlying snapshots to recovery or clone them. But often I get asked if I have a PowerShell (PowerCLI) script to do one or all of them. I have a bunch on my GitHub, but I decided a week or so ago to put something a bit more robust together. At first I was making it a standard interactive script, but it morphed into a GUI, using combo-boxes etc:
Continue reading “PowerShell GUI VMware and FlashArray Storage Management Tool”
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:
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”
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:
Just a quick tip here, I’ve noticed a fair amount of people do not know what happens when we restore a volume concerning the special “hidden” operation we take in case you make a mistake. So I thought it worth a quick post.
Continue reading “Automatic protection during a FlashArray Snapshot Restore”
This is part 4 of this 7 part series.
The series being:
This is part 3 of this 7 part series. The series being:
Continue reading “VMFS Snapshots and the FlashArray Part III: Why might a resignature fail?”
This is part 2 of this 7 part series. The series being:
This is a topic that I have looked into years ago, mainly in ESX 4.0 when they changed how it handled unresolved VMFS volumes by allowing it to be done selectively. I have had some customers working with array-based snapshots recently and have run into issues that prevent them from mounting them, or mounting them in the way they want. The problem is that I forgot most of the caveats from that testing because it was way before I started this blog. And as that quote popularized by Mythbusters’ Adam Savage says:
So let’s write it down to so I can’t forget it all again. That show is on its last season right now. I will certainly miss it! But anyways, I digress. Force mounting. Don’t do it and here is why.
Continue reading “VMFS Snapshots and the FlashArray Part II: Why not Force Mount?”
This is part 1 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. Let’s start with what an unresolved VMFS is and how to mount it.
The series being:
Continue reading “VMFS Snapshots and the FlashArray Part I: Mounting an unresolved VMFS”