2vcps and a Truck

February 10, 2016

New Features in Pure1 – Analytics

The best just gets better? Pure1 Manage is Pure Storage’s SaaS based management tool for Pure customers. Beside getting tons of health, capacity and performance information you now have some new. It is a pretty hard upgrade process that requires updating VM’s at each site and possibly some consulting services. Just kidding. It is already available, no effort from you required. Just login to pure1.purestorage.com.

Capacity Analytics

You are now able to use the Analytics tab to project out your current growth to determine when your array will be getting towards full. Very nice. Included with your Pure Storage FlashArray. No extra anything to buy. Sweet.

Support

Also, as a bonus, you can see the Support tab now in the Pure 1 Manage screen. This will let you see all open support tickets for each of your arrays. Simplicity wins every time. Keep checking the Pure 1 portal as our team rolls our great new innovations.

February 9, 2016

Pure//Accelerate

Have you registered for Pure Accelerate yet? You should do it right now.

The next great conference where you actually learn about what is pertinent to your passion for IT. Develop insight for what is next, and hear from your peers and industry experts about moving to the next generation of IT.

In 10 years you will tell people, yeah, I was at the very first Pure//Accelerate, I was there before EVERYONE else. You can be the IT hipster all over again. Before it moved to Moscone and had 30,000 people. You can move to Portland and drink IPA’s and post pictures of them to Instagram.

JPEG image-069AC5307867-1

February 4, 2016

UNMAP – Do IT!

Pretty sure my friend Cody Hosterman has talked about this until he turned blue in the face. Just a point I want to quickly re-iterate here for the record. Run unmap on your vSphere Datastores.

Read this if you are running Pure Storage, but even if you run other arrays (especially all-flash) find a way to do UNMAP on a regular basis:

http://www.codyhosterman.com/2016/01/flasharray-unmap-script-with-the-pure-storage-powershell-sdk-and-poweractions/

Additionally, start to learn the ins-n-outs of vSphere 6 and automatic unmap!

http://blog.purestorage.com/direct-guest-os-unmap-in-vsphere-6-0-2/

Speaking of In-n-out…. I want a double double before I start Whole 30.

in-n-out

January 8, 2016

Pure ELK Dashboards

Previously I blogged about getting PureELK installed with Docker in just a couple of minutes. After setting up your intitial array’s you may ask what is next?

Loading a preconfigured PureELK Dashboard

Click load saved dashboard and select one of the Pure Storage dashboards.

Remember there is a 2nd page page of Dashboards.

Pure Main Dashboard

Top 10 Volumes

Alert Audit

Max vs Average Pure Performance

Pure Space Analysis

Space Top – Bar Charts

Volume List View – Space and Performance

You can see there are several pre-made dashboards that you can take advantage of. What if you wanted to make your own Dashboard.

Create your Own Dashboard

To create your own Dashboard:
1. Click the Plus to Add a Visualization
2. Select a visualization
3. Once you have all of your Visualizations added you can click the Save icon and keep your new Dashboard for later use.

Some tips is you can resize and place the visualization anywhere you like on the dashboard. Just remember to click save. Also, You can can use the powerful seach feature to create tables of useful information that you are looking for.

December 22, 2015

Easy Storage Monitoring – Setting Up PureELK with Docker

[UPDATE June 2016: Appears this works with Ubuntu only, maybe a debian flavor. I am hearing RHEL is problematic to get the dependencies working.]

I have blogged in the past about setting up vROPS (vCOPS) and Splunk to monitor a Pure Storage FlashArray using the REST API. Scripts and GETs and PUTs are fun and all but what if there was a simple tool you can install to have your own on site monitoring and analytics of your FlashArrays?

Enter Pure ELK. Some super awesome engineers back in Mountain View wrote this integration for Pure and ELK and packaged it an amazingly easy insatllation and released it on Github! Open Source and ready to go!
https://github.com/pureelk

and

http://github.com/pureelk/pureelk

Don’t know Docker? Cool we will install it for you. Don’t know Kibana or elasticsearch? Got you covered. One line in a fresh Ubuntu install (I used Ubuntu but I bet your favorite flavor will suffice).

go ahead and try:

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pureelk/pureelk/master/pureelk.sh | bash -s install

(fixed url to reflect no longer in Dev)

This will download and install docker, setup all the dependencies for Pure ELK and let you know where to go from your browser to config your FlashArrays.

I had one small snag:

Connecting to the Docker Daemon!

My user was not in the right group to connect to docker the first time. The Docker install when it is not automated actually tells you to add your user to the “docker” group in order to

$sudo usermod -aG docker [username]

Log out and back in that did the trick. If you know a better way for the change to be recognized without logging out let me know in the comments.

I re-ran the install
curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pureelk/pureelk/dev/pureelk.sh | bash -s install

In about 4 minutes I was able to hit the management IP and start adding FlashArrays!

Quickly add all your FlashArrays

Click the giant orange PLUS button.

This is great if you have more than one FlashArray. If you only have one it still works. Everyone should have more Flash though right?

Fill in your FlashArray information. You can choose your time-to-live for the metrics and how often to pull data from the FlashArray

Success!

I added a couple of arrays for fun and then clicked “Go to Kibana”
I could have gone to
https://[server ip]:5601

Data Already Collecting

This is just the beginning. The next post I will share some of the pre-packaged dashboards and also some of the cusotmizations you can make in order to visualize all the Data PureELK is pulling from the REST API. Have fun with this free tool. It can be downloaded and setup in less than 10 minutes on a linux machine, 15 minutes if you need to build a new VM.

September 21, 2015

Register: VMUG Webinar and Pure Storage September 22

Register here: http://tinyurl.com/pq5fd9k

September 22 at 1:00pm Eastern time Pure Storage and VMware will be highlighting the results of ESG Lab Validation paper. The study on consolidating workloads with VMware and Pure Storage used a single FlashArray //m50 and deployed five virtualized mission-critical workloads VMware Horizon View, Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server (OLTP), Microsoft SQL Server (data warehouse) and Oracle (OLTP). While I won’t steal all the thunder it is good to note that all of this was run with zero tuning on the applications. Want out of the business of tweaking and tuning everything in order to get just a little more performance from your application? Problem Solved. Plus check out the FlashArray and the consistent performance even during failures.

Tier 1 workloads in 3u of Awesomeness

You can see in the screenshot the results of running tier one application on an array made to withstand real-world ups and downs of the datacenter. Things happen to hardware and software even, but it is good to see the applications still doing great. We always tell customers, it is not how fast the array is in a pristine benchmark, but how does it respond when things are not going well, when controller loses power or a drive (or two) fails. That is what sets Pure Storage apart (that and data reduction and real Evergreen Storage).

Small note: Another proven environment with near 32k block sizes. This one hung out between 20k and 32k, don’t fall for 4k or 8k nonsense benchmarks. When the blocks hit the array from VMware this is just what we see.

Register for the Webinar
http://tinyurl.com/pq5fd9k
You can win a GoPro too.

August 28, 2015

Finally Getting my vSphere 6 Lab running on Ravello

Using the Autolab 2.6 Config

Head on over the Labguides.com and check out autolab. I wanted a quick start, but didn’t want all the fun to be automated out of my hands. So I will give a quick tour of how I got my basic lab up and going. Part 2 I will add a VSAN cluster so I can catch up there too.

The auto-builds of Windows worked great. The domain controller auto setup with DHCP, Active Directory and the fun bits to get PXE working the the ESXi install. This is stuff I didn’t want to waste time on.

I had to re-kick off the vCenter build to get Powershell and PowerCLI up and going. I had to manually install vCenter 6 and the vCenter Appliance doesn’t play nice with Autolab. Ok for me because I actually wanted to run through the install to check the options and see if things like SSO setup got any better.

Letting the hosts PXE boot for vSphere 6 install.

ESXi Install finished

Installing vCenter 6.0

Deploying vCenter was actually pretty smooth. Small lab so I am using the Embedded Deployment.

Adding Hosts

Troubleshooting HA Issues

Just like old times the HA agents didn’t install correctly the first time. The more things change…

Great stuff from Ravello

Very thankful for the vExpert Lab space Ravello provided. If you are considering a home lab but don’t want to buy servers and switches and even storage this can be a good way to play with vSphere. I also spun up Photon and Openstack. Although I want to walk through the Openstack install from start to finish.

One of my hosts did this on boot but a quick restart and it was fine. Next step is to add some VSAN hosts which I will show next time.

(Hey, it’s emulated IntelVT on top of AWS, so its not-PROD.)

Links:

http://www.ravellosystems.com

http://www.labguides.com

Use Ravello Repo to get the autolab config, openstack (which I am also playing with), and some other blueprints for labs.

https://www.ravellosystems.com/repo/

Some help from this post from William Lam

http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2015/04/running-nested-esxi-vsan-home-lab-on-ravello.html

August 26, 2015

VMworld 2015 Wish List

As I no longer have view into roadmap for anyone. I thought I would make my wish list for announcements coming from VMware in 5 days. Actually it is a wish item.

No FLASH vSphere 6.x Webclient.

Browser plugins should go in here:

(and you all thought I was biased toward flash)

Honestly though there is nothing worse* than when my Adobe Flash plugin is old or I can only hit the vCenter from a jump server that you don’t want to install crappy browser plugins. I don’t want to buffer my time by 15 minutes to upgrade the flash plugin every time I need vCenter to do something. Right, I didn’t need my 27 browser tabs anyways when Adobe asks to close all browsers on my system. <rant over>

Star Explosion Death Sar animated GIF

*I know there are worse things in the world, call this a “VMadmin World Problem”

August 18, 2015

How to get the latest Pure1 Manage

Just kidding, it already happened. No VM to upgrade. No packages to push out to 9 datacenters. Pure SaaS goodness. (See what I did there?)

Want a little more detail in Pure1? Try out the expanded view. The expanded view shown below provides a little more insight into the Capacity, Health and Performance of the Flash Array.

Click the title of each section in order to drill down to more detail of each Flash Array. We will take a deeper look at our lab m70.

Performance

Health

Capacity

April 15, 2015

PureStorage + REST API + Splunk = Fun with Data about Data

A few months back I posted a powershell script to post Pure Storage data directly into VMware vCenter Operations Manager (now called vRealize Operations). Inspiration hit me like a brick when a big customer of mine said, “Do you have a plugin for Splunk?”

He already wrote some scripts in python to pull data from our REST API. He just said, “Sure wish I didn’t have to do this myself.” I took the hint. Now I am not a python person, so I did the best I could with the tools I have.
You will notice that the script is very similar to the one I wrote for vCOPS. That is because open REST API’s rock, if you don’t have one for your product you are wrong. 🙂

The formatting in WordPress ALWAYS breaks scripts when I paste them. So head over to GitHub and download the script today.
https://github.com/2vcps/post-rest2splunk/tree/master

Like before I schedule this as a task to run every 5 minutes. That seems to not explode the tiny Splunk VM I am running in VMware Fusion to test this out.

Dashboards. Check.

Some very basic Dashboards I created. I am not a Splunk ninja, perhaps you know one? I am sure people that have done this for a while can pull much better visuals out of this data.

Pivot Table

Stats from a Lab array some Averages computed by Splunk.

Gauge Report of Max Latency (that is micro seconds)

A 1000 of these is 1 millisecond 🙂 pretty nice.

From Wikipedia
A microsecond is an SI unit of time equal to one millionth (0.000001 or 10−6 or 1/1,000,000) of a second. Its symbol is μs. One microsecond is to one second as one second is to 11.574 days. A microsecond is equal to 1000 nanoseconds or 1/1,000 milliseconds.

Even if everything else didn’t help you at least you learned that today. Right?

The link to github again https://github.com/2vcps/post-rest2splunk/tree/master