"Remember kids, the only difference between Science and screwing around is writing it down" -Alex Jason (made popular by Adam Savage)
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:
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”
This week I received a question from a customer about some slowness in the vSphere “Add Storage” wizard they were seeing. This is a problem that has occurred over the years quite a few times for a variety of different reasons. VMware has fixed most of them, this latest reason luckily was known and has a relatively simple solution. An option called VMFS.UnresolvedVolumeLiveCheck.
Continue reading “Add Storage Wizard Slowness and Unresolved VMFS Volumes”
In my last blog post I wrote about how to provision a new volume from ScaleIO to your VMware environment so the next logical step is what do you do when that volume is completely consumed. Well you have to options; provision a new volume or expand an existing one. Since the former option was covered in my last post, let’s look at the second option.
VMware vSphere has offered the ability to dynamically expand VMFS volumes since, well, vSphere was introduced (version 4.0). VMFS Volume Grow allows ESXi to recognize when a physical device has expanded in capacity and enables an administrator to non-disruptively expand the VMFS volume to take advantage of the extra space without resorting to using messy extents.
Continue reading “Expanding a ScaleIO Volume in a VMware environment”