snapshots – Cody Hosterman

October 29, 2018October 31, 2019

PowerCLI and VVols Part V: Array Snapshots and VVols

Another post in my series on VVols and PowerCLI, for previous posts see these:

This post will be about managing one-off snapshots with VVols on the FlashArray with PowerCLI.

One of the still semi-valid reasons I have seen DBAs say “I dont want to virtualize because…” Is that they have simple snapshot/recovery scripts for their physical server that allows them to quickly restore DBs from snapshots. Doing this on VMFS requires A LOT of coordination with the VMware layer.

So they tell the VMware team–“okay I will virtualize but I want RDMs”. Well the VMware team says “well we’d rather die”

…and around in circles we go…

VVols provides the ability to provide this benefit (easy snapshot stuff) but still get the benefits of VMware stuff (vMotion, Storage vMotion, cloning, etc) without the downside of RDMs.

So let’s walk though that process.

July 30, 2018

Virtual Volumes and Array Snapshots Part I: Managed Snapshots

One of the first technical benefits users can enjoy around VVols is the use of snapshotting. Snapshots created through VMware of VMs have always been a point of contention which as severely limited their usability (see a post I did around the performance impact of them here).

With VVols, when you right-click on a VM and choose take snapshot, VMware does not create the performance-impacting delta VMDK files that were traditionally used, but instead VMware entirely offloads this process to the array. So the array creates the snapshots and VMware just tracks them.

But since VMs are now a collection of individual volumes on the array (a VVol is just an array volume) you can also snapshot and restore individual virtual disks as well directly on the array.

So what does all of this mean?

Continue reading “Virtual Volumes and Array Snapshots Part I: Managed Snapshots”

September 30, 2016October 3, 2016

1.7 Release of the FlashArray Workflow Package for vRealize Orchestrator

Finally starting to catch up on work after VMworld. A lot of blog posts queued up in my head that I want to start getting out. Here is the first. I have completed an update of the FlashArray workflow package with some bug fixes and some new workflows. As always the workflow package can be found here:

https://github.com/codyhosterman/orchestrator/blob/master/com.purestorage.codyhosterman.package

Continue reading “1.7 Release of the FlashArray Workflow Package for vRealize Orchestrator”

January 17, 2014

Creating ScaleIO Snapshots in a VMware environment

Let’s talk about snapshots and ScaleIO.

First how does snapshot-ing work with ScaleIO? ScaleIO offers the ability to snapshot a single volume at a time or cloning multiple volumes at once. Importantly, ScaleIO, when snapshot-ing multiple volumes at once, those copies will be consistent with each other at the time of creation. A consistency group is created when a snapshot command includes multiple volumes–this is helpful for situations where multiple VMs on multiple volumes need consistent copies but the source applications may not be able to be quiesced at the time. ScaleIO does not though prevent you from deleting one snapshot in a consistency group–you may manage those volumes after the fact however you wish.

Continue reading “Creating ScaleIO Snapshots in a VMware environment”