"Remember kids, the only difference between Science and screwing around is writing it down" -Alex Jason (made popular by Adam Savage)
We just released an updated plugin for vRO today that is fully certified by VMware and is available on the VMware marketplace:
Download it here.
What are the new features? Well a lot–some various bug fixes, but this is mostly about new features:
A few months back I was reviewing our VMware training for our field (and after some direct feedback) realized it wasn’t really doing what our field needed. It was too nuts and bolts technical–which isn’t really what was needed by the masses. There was more of a desire to understand the value of the VMware product, the value of the integration and the value that we as Pure can bring to it.
The ones that wanted/needed more technical training could get that as needed.
In short, what they wanted to be able to do was have the “I’m staffing a booth at a conference and someone asks me about vRealize Orchestrator”. Not being an expert in the product, how to do I quickly understand the value, so I know if I am chasing the right product/solution and I should inquire further.
There are so many options out there, the “why” sometimes can be the most important question. Continue reading “VMware & Pure Integration Training Videos”
Amidst writing a vMSC guide for our newly-introduced Active-Active replication called ActiveCluster, I have been taking some breaks to finish my vRealize Orchestrator Workflow Package for Virtual Volumes. I posted a starter post recently:
Getting Started with vRealize Orchestrator and VVols
I am almost done with v1, but until then another starter post. Continue reading “Assigning a VVol VM Storage Policy with vRO”
So a few updates. I just updated my vSphere Best Practices guide and it can be found here:
Download Best Practices Guide PDF
I normally do not create a blog post about updating the guide, but this one was a major overhaul and I think is worth mentioning. Furthermore, there are a few documents I have written and published that I want to mention.
Continue reading “Documentation Update, Best Practices and vRealize”
This is a blog I have been waiting a long time to write. The past year and a half of my work has heavily focused on improving and building our VMware vRealize integration at Pure Storage. Log Insight and Operations Manager integration already existed (analytics etc.), so the next logical step is actually provisioning (orchestration). So vRealize Orchestrator and Automation. The first step I took was using the built-in REST plugin in vRO to build a workflow package that customers could use to actually manage the FlashArray without much work on their own part inside of vRO.
I started to realize that a workflow package was not enough. Especially when it comes to vRA Anything-As-A-Service integration. A big part of what is missing from a workflow package is custom objects and inventory management. Something that a plugin can easily achieve. So, without further ado–please meet the FlashArray vRO plugin! Downloadable at the VMware Solution Exchange and fully certified by VMware and Pure Storage:
My vRO plugin white paper Continue reading “Introducing the FlashArray Plugin for vRealize Orchestrator v1.0”
As I have blogged about before, TLS 1.0 and SSL v3 were deprecated in Purity 4.7, requiring all connections to use either TLS 1.1 or TLS 1.2. This affected a variety of integrations, some we updated, some you just had to alter their behavior. A few VMware products do not/did not use TLS 1.1/1.2 by default, so they either need to altered or upgraded. This almost invariably boiled down to the JDK version that was in use. vRealize Orchestrator is no exception.
Continue reading “vRealize Orchestrator, TLS 1.2 and Certificate Importing”
Let me start out with saying I’m embarrassed I have only been using vRO for 8 months or so. It is AWESOME.
The FlashArray Workflow Package for vRealize Orchestrator has been updated to include two new objects:
The creation of the first part is explained in this post. But if you are using the FlashArray it is all built into the package, so you have to do very little work. I’ll explain in a bit.
The UNMAP workflow is generic–it can be used with any VMFS datastore that supports UNMAP. So it is included in the workflow package and it is also standalone for those of you who don’t have a FlashArray. You can get the standalone here:
https://github.com/codyhosterman/orchestrator/blob/master/vmfsunmap.workflow
Virtual disk oversubscription is becoming increasingly common and so is allowing people to provision their own VMs. So increasing a datastore capacity is also an increasingly common operation. Because of the performance of flash, merged with ESXi features like VAAI ATS. Expanding a VMFS is easy. Expanding a storage volume these days is easy. But you still have to actually do it. What if I want to automate the process to respond to datastore capacity threshold limits? There are a variety of ways to achieve this. Let’s look at it via vCenter SNMP alerts and vRealize Orchestrator workflows. Continue reading “Automatic VMFS expansion with vCenter SNMP and vRealize Orchestrator”
I am working on adding some functionality to the FlashArray workflow package for vRealize Orchestrator and one of those features is automating the process to increase the capacity of a VMFS volume. The FlashArray potion of that is pretty straight forward but what of the VMFS portion? Not much on the internet directly about this. Luckily using the vCenter SDK with vRO, this is pretty easy. Continue reading “Increasing VMFS capacity with vRealize Orchestrator”
I want to say this is the culmination of my last almost two years of creating vRealize integration for Pure Storage, but that isn’t the right word. It is a milestone, because there is still so much more cool stuff to be done. Especially with vRealize Automation. In many ways it is just the beginning! But I can now demonstrate Pure Storage FlashArray integration with the whole vRealize stack: Log Insight, Operations, Orchestrator and Automation.
Log Insight has a Content Pack. Operations has the Management Pack. Orchestrator has the Workflow Package. Automation also uses that Workflow Package. Let’s talk about how.
