Pure Storage vSphere Plugin - vVols Management

hello this video will be covering how to use the pure storage vsphere plug-in to help manage your vivols environment we're going to cover registering the vasa providers mounting a v-ball data store importing p groups as policies viewing the vm details restoring the v-vault from a snapshot creating a volume of eval copy and recovering a vm that was deleted all with the vsphere plug-in first let's register the vasa providers from the main plugin page once an array has been added there will be the option to register the storage provider first let's go ahead and register this array so we'll give it a name the url and a username and password that will be able to authenticate with the flash array once the array is added we will then have the option to register the storage provider here we will need to provide a username and password now our best practice and recommendation is to create a local array user that is an array admin here it's called vvols admin to register your storage providers with now we'll be able to register the storage providers with this user here once registered we can go ahead and navigate to the vcenter under configure and storage providers to check and make sure that those storage providers are indeed registered and are active and online there is the array information and the storage providers that are both online and registered next we will be creating the vival data store in the process of mounting the vival datastore with the vsphere plugin before getting started with that we want to make sure that we have a host group and host objects correlate to the esxi cluster we'll use the plugin to go ahead and do that in most cases this step will have already been done at some point and so you can skip this part and jump to the next where we will actually create the vivald data store now on the flash array we'll have that host and host group for this esxi cluster next we'll right click on the es6i cluster navigate to pure storage and create a data store here we will create a vival data store give it a name and then we will select the compute resource here just the esxi cluster and we will choose the array that we want to create this on process will be connecting the protocol endpoint to the host group object on the flash array then re-scanning for that device and then creating the vivo storage container now here we can see that there is a warning or an alarm that was triggered and the alarm is due to the vsphere ha file not being able to be created now this in fact is not true it was created and we can see that the protocol endpoint is connected to the host group we can see the device there is healthy the connectivity of the hosts are healthy now we actually look at the air here it says that the vsphere ha failed to create a configuration file which looking at the files itself we can see it so this happens as a race condition essentially the vsphere has expecting that file creation to happen quicker than it does and all you need to do is just reconfigure vsphere ha for the host in that esxi cluster and that will go ahead and clear that error that you see i'm just watching the task for the reconfiguring of vsphere ha now it's complete i can go over to the data store and that air alarm and error is gone next we're going to import protection groups on the flasharray as spbm policies from the pure storage plugin you will navigate to the array and then there is an import protection groups what this will be doing is this is going to import the rules for that protection group such as whether it's replication snapshot its interval and retention and it will use those rules to create a storage policy in that vcenter this storage policy by default will be named whatever the operation for that rule is whether it's a snapshot or replication and then how much of its interval is i'm going to go ahead and rename them just for understanding which array it's for or naming it to whatever you would need to and we can go ahead and take a look at it the rules and we can see the pure storage rules are there replication and we see the interval and retention as well as the compatible storage since that protection group exists on the flash array it would indeed be able to be compatible with that vivald datastore i'm going to do the same with the other storage policy as well here we can see the rules are different instead of a snapshot this is a replication which would be based off of the protection group that was imported from the flash array now let's go ahead and apply these policies to a few vms so on the vm we can go ahead and configure go to policies and then we are going to edit the vm storage policies this is a two part choosing the storage policy itself here the replication and then configuring the replication group all right and we'll go ahead and apply this policy and replication group associated with that policy to each of these vms i'll go ahead and speed up the process here so we can get to the next section next we will be covering the details that the vsphere plug-in is able to report for this vm and the v-ball objects on the flash array and the different operations for them so first let's check which vivo vms that we have so we will look at the data store look at the vms and we will go ahead and navigate to these vms now from the main page there is a section that is going to tell you what the protection status for this vm is and by protection status we mean whether or not this vm can be recovered from snapshots in case it is accidentally deleted then clicking on virtual volumes we are taken to the configure tab and the virtual volume section here we can get the information for each of the virtual volumes that are used with this vm here we can see its virtual device the size which data store it's on which array that data store is on and then the volume group and volume name on the flash array as well as the operations to import restore and overwrite a virtual volume using the plugin now we are going to cover how to restore a virtual volume from a flasharray snapshot using the vsphere here i have a couple of windows vms and a few virtual volumes attached to them so we have our c drive and in this case an m drive essentially test volumes that have some files in them we are going to delete this virtual disk for that test volume one here we're going to delete the files from the data store which will tell vasa to unbind that volume and to destroy it and then it will be pending eradication for 24 hours and so now we have the option to restore a destroyed deleted virtual disk and so from this page we can restore deleted disk and this will find this date of evol that we just destroyed and we can go ahead and recover it then in the vm i can refresh and that drive should show back up and should show back up as online and certainly enough the test volume is there as are all the files that were on that volume next we're going to go ahead and cover recovering from a point in time so with this vm i have two folders here and some files in there but i just realized that some files were deleted and i need to go ahead and roll back to a previous snapshot and so we're going to go ahead and offline the disk in guest and then we're going to navigate back to the virtual volumes page and configure and we're going to select that virtual disk and we're going to override it this is going to give us the option to overwrite this virtual disk and we can choose this virtual disk snapshot so now we can find the snapshot that we want to roll back to and this will allow us to overwrite the this date of evol with the snapshot from this point in time now that operation is complete we can go ahead and refresh in guest and then bring the volume online once that volume is online we can navigate to it and we will actually see that we have recovered those directories that were accidentally deleted next we will be reviewing the process to create a vival copy using the vsphere plugin we'll navigate to the configure and virtual volumes page and here we can import a virtual disk specifically a date of evolve from one of the vvol vms that exists on this flash array and vcenter so we can browse to the specific vm and browse to the specific virtual disk or data v-vault and this will give us the list of each of the snapshots associated with this volume now if there's a managed snapshot we will see it as a dash snap that's there and then in the front of it we will see what the name of the protection group on the flash array is and then what the snapshot name is beyond that we will see the name of the date of evol as well there so that's a managed snapshot there and this is the other snapshot so we're going to go ahead and import this one so this creates a new virtual disk and then does a pure vol copy as it copies out and overwrites it on the flash array so we're going to actually go ahead in this same virtual disk we're going to import two different point in times so that first one was from a p group snapshot on the flash array and this one is importing a managed snapshot on the flash array and then i can refresh in the guest check that the discs are online if we refresh here you will see that one of them is offline so we'll need to actually bring it online but first let's go ahead and see one of the test volumes that we just recovered and we can see the test volume 2 and here there's only those two files now we did recover from another point in time earlier that same test volume so let's go ahead and check that volume out and we can actually navigate through it and expect the files and we'll see that there are two different file types so just showing that we can import different point in time for the virtual disks and see the difference of the files there how to recover a deleted vival vm using the vsphere plug-in will be our final topic now we're going to go ahead and power off one of these vms and so we're going to shut down the gust and then if we go ahead and check its protection for this vm we'll notice that it is indeed protected and it's going to give us a timestamp for when the last snapshot on the flash array of the config v ball was taken and here we can see it was at 242 it's been about 16 minutes since this was taken so any changes to the vm like cpu or memory or additional virtual disks will not be backed up is deleted now on the flash array we can actually see that the volume group and volumes are now in a destroyed state pending eradication and so because they're in a destroyed state for 24 hours before they're eradicated we have the ability to recover this vm with the vsphere plug-in navigate to the vvol data store right click on it and then in the pure storage option there is undelete virtual machine the trick with recovering the vvol vm with the plug-in is that we have to have that config v-vault backup with an array based snapshot this is because when a v-vault vm is deleted vmware clears the config valve before telling the storage to destroy that volume so in order for us to recover the vm we need to be able to roll back the config vball to one of those snapshots so that then all of the data v-balls are correctly associated to that vm here we're going to answer the question as this was a newly registered vm from an existing vmx file and then power it on and we will see that the os is indeed booting and then we can log into the guests check all the files make sure it is there so that is how you're able to undelete a vival vm thank you for watching and please see the vmware platform guide from pure storage for all of our integration between pure and vmware

Channel: Pure Storage Cloud Solutions

Views: 1,279

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Id: 6CdLfqU5zNI

Length: 14min 45sec (885 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 20 2020