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File Presets and Workloads for FlashBlade File

Watch a detailed demonstration walkthrough of a real-world example for implementing File Presets and deploying those workloads with a fleet from a FlashBlade or FlashArray.
Walkthrough | 1715 min.
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The Everpure Platform
00:07
The Pure platform now has the ability to utilize the power, simplicity, and flexibility of FlashBlade file within Fusion presets and workloads. Expanding on the functionality of creating preset templates and policies, FlashBlade file workloads can be deployed as workloads safely with the same Pure simplicity as our FlashArray block and file presets.
00:30
Let's watch a detailed demonstration of it in action. In this demonstration, I'm gonna be walking through creating FlashBlade file presets and workloads. We're starting out with a fleet of three arrays: a FlashArray one, a FlashBlade one, and a FlashBlade two. The FlashArray, we'll get to in another demonstration.
00:53
Right now, we're gonna focus on the two FlashBlades. So currently, I'm on FlashBlade one, and I'm gonna go to Storage and then Presets. Now, I'm gonna be doing this demonstration from the system administrator or a storage administrator standpoint, where I'll be focused on VDI workloads, virtual desktop infrastructure workloads, and it's really kind of a good example to use when looking at file
01:16
presets. So if you've never created a preset on your arrays, after you've created a fleet, you'll be presented with this screen. This screen will allow you to create your preset or upload a preset via JSON format. Now, we'll get to the upload process here in a little bit, so I'm just gonna go ahead and create my first preset.
01:40
We have the options here to go to the FlashArray Block and FlashArray File, or FlashBlade File. We'll do the FlashBlade File. We can skip the preset compatibility check, which basically means that if you don't have a particular storage class or array model type in your infrastructure today, you can go ahead
01:58
and create that preset that's targeted towards it, and then once you add that model or array to the fleet, you'll be able to use the preset then. So for the preset name, I'm gonna use something very generic. It's gonna be a general user share, and we're gonna focus this one on the warehouse VDI. So we have the general user share warehouse.
02:26
Now, the workload type, you could select a workload type of file. And in the storage class, we're gonna select the FlashBlade S200, which we have in our fleet. Now, I could put a description here, and I could also add workload tags, but I'm gonna keep it simple for now. With workload tags, they're work tags or labels that you can add that show up for each
02:48
workload, and then you can actually do things like search on tags and group them together. So it's pretty much a convenience item that allows you to index, if you will, the workloads as they're created, or even charge back or look back. I'm not gonna select a workload tag. We're just gonna click on Done.
03:13
From here, I'm gonna add the file resources, storage resources. So the resource type is a file system, and we'll select a resource name. Since this is a file system, I'm gonna do a file. As this is gonna be a file system, say, zero one, just for internal naming convention.
03:41
For the number of file systems, we're just gonna select one, and that's where you can get into the system naming. Now, we actually ca- call this entry field, or modal, or resource naming customization, and you'll be able to see this box in a couple different locations when you're dealing with presets and workloads across the Pure platform.
03:58
This allows you to create custom naming conventions for what you're creating. You may have a specific naming convention that you have to adhere to in your environment. You may also have requirements for compliance, governance, or audit that requires you to do certain naming for resources and objects. We'll give you the flexibility to name these as you like.
04:16
There are certain limitations to this, and those are documented in our knowledge base, but you do have the ability to go through and create dynamic names. You also have the ability to use other options like functions, attributes, and even customized inputs by clicking the plus key. I'm gonna leave this as is, and now we're gonna have to go and create an export
04:37
configuration. So we'll click on Add export. From here, again, I'm given the option to name my export according to any customized or standard naming conventions. I'm just gonna pick SMB protocol for this one, and we have to have an export policy. I don't have any existing policy, so I'm gonna go ahead and define a new one.
04:59
This one I'm just gonna label my, SMB policy zero one, and I'm going to go ahead and name the export policy the same name. Now, these are pretty much basic access rules that involve any client, SMB or NFS, so I'm gonna go ahead and put a wild card here for the client. I'm gonna set the, the read/write for the permissions, and I'm gonna click on Add rule.
05:29
So now the rule is assigned to the device configuration, and we'll go ahead and click Save. I could go ahead and select a quota size or a snapshot configuration, but I'm not gonna do that just yet. I'm gonna keep it very simple. For the server reference, we'll go ahead and pick a server.
05:47
This is the only server that's created by default, as I have not created any others. We'll select the default, and then I'll click Add configuration. Now that the configuration is set, and I can go ahead and confirm my storage resource. Once that's all done, I'm able to publish the preset.... Now you can see that the preset has been published.
06:08
If I go to FlashBlade 2, I click on Presets, you'll see the preset there as well. Going back to FlashBlade 1, we'll go ahead and deploy that preset. Notice that I'm in local array view. I want to make sure that I'm in fleet view when working in the fleet. That way, I can see everything across the fleet.
06:29
I'm gonna go ahead and click the plus menu icon. I'm gonna go ahead and deploy the workload, so I choose a preset. It gives me an overview of the preset itself. I'll go ahead and click Next. Now it wants a workload name.
06:43
I'm gonna say this is going to be Warehouse VDI, and this is gonna be the workload 01. Now I'll go ahead and click Next. Now we're getting to workload placement. Workload placement works with all of the arrays which are in the fleet, and it goes through a set of processes to determine where the best place to workload within the fleet of
07:07
arrays. What it does is it utilizes capacity planning from Pure1 first, if it can reach that service, and provides recommendations. If the path to Pure1 is not available, it will be able to query the internal fleet itself. This would be used in such scenarios as a dark site. This will allow you to get also get a placement recommendation based off of the
07:26
internal metrics that are being accumulated and kept within the fleet. For placement targets, I'm gonna go ahead and select all of them in the dropdown. For the projection period, I'm just gonna leave it as is and click on Get Recommendations. Now it's telling me that there are two acceptable arrays that I could be using, FlashBlade 1 or FlashBlade 2.
08:01
I'm gonna go ahead and select FlashBlade 2. We'll click Next from here, and I'll deploy the workload. After a few moments, you can see that the workload has been deployed. We can go ahead and click on the name of the workload, and we can see the workload details. If we switch over to FlashBlade 2 and look at the workloads, again, making sure we're in
08:24
fleet view mode, we click on that workload, and now we can see the details again. We can take a look at the fleet file systems that are there, along with the exports that were created. We can also go back, and we can take a look at the export itself to make sure it's correct and everything is there. This is pretty much a preset as it is, and it's a very basic preset.
08:47
Now we're gonna go ahead and export this preset. Now, as a system administrator, I may want to take this preset that I just created, and I want to edit it. There are a couple different reasons for that. Maybe I want to edit it because I've got something wrong, or maybe I want to edit it
09:03
and save it as a new preset to be used elsewhere. Instead of going back and reentering all that information I had previously done, maybe I just want to change a few things. As an example, I want to add something to it or remove something from it. Let's take a look at how we actually can do that.
09:19
What I can do is I can be inside of a preset, and I can click over here on the right kebab menu, and then I can click on Edit. Now, the problem with that is it's gonna edit the existing preset, and whatever you save in it, it's going to come back, and it's gonna save it as the same preset, and you'll see a revision count field ch- name changed to two.
09:50
So we don't wanna do that. We wanna keep this preset as is. What I'm gonna do is actually going to do a download of the preset. Now, when you do that, it's gonna ask you for the name of the preset file, and I'll just take the default, and the file is gonna be in a JSON format.
10:06
We'll click on Save, and now it's downloaded. So now we can open up the JSON file in Notepad, and you can see it's just a simple file written in JSON that contains all of the information about the preset. Currently, the file is displayed in a non-formatted JSON. This will be changing in a more structured outline format for easier reading and editing
10:25
in a future release. We could go ahead and edit this as is, but you have to be careful with JSON. If you end up missing a bracket, an apostrophe, a quote, or anything that alters the syntax, and it's off just by a character, that can be a problem. So we'll just leave the file as it is, and we'll do an upload.
10:52
As promised, coming back to the upload process, we'll click up here on the kebab menu, and we'll say Upload. We'll brow- browse for the file, and when I get to the file, it will prompt me for the file name. I want to call this something else, so I'm gonna say that this is going to be a general user share, and instead of warehouse, I'm
11:21
gonna put office. Now, okay, I can again skip the preset compatibility check in the case of the hardware or the array type that I want isn't in the environment, but I'm just gonna go ahead and click Save. So now I have two presets. Currently, they're the exact same preset until I go ahead and edit the one for office.
11:50
Now that I'm in this one for office, I can go ahead and edit it. If I wanted to do anything here from a description standpoint, and obviously I do, because this is no longer for the warehouse, this is gonna be for the office. If I wanted to put a workload tag in here, I could do that as well. But what I wanna do is I just wanna add another file system, since the office VDI
12:11
needs to use NFS along with SMB.... So we'll go ahead and add another storage resource. It's gonna be a file system, and for this one, I'm gonna select NFS. Leave the number at one. The file naming I'll leave as is, and I'm gonna do the same thing I did for SMB.
12:42
I'm gonna create an export configuration, and I'm gonna say it's NFS, and define a new policy. For clients, I'll again, I'll put in a wild card. For protocol, I'll select them all, and security, I'll select sys. From there, I'll leave everything else the same, and I'll click Add Rule.
13:11
So now we have the rule defined inside of the policy, and we'll click Save. As it is right now, I have two file systems in this preset. Now, once I can't confirm the storage resources just yet, and that is because I haven't selected a server reference for the NFS. So we'll go ahead and we'll click on that server reference, and we'll do an add
13:30
configuration. Now that the Add Configuration button is available, go ahead and click it, and now I can publish the preset. So you'll notice here that it actually did increment the preset revision number because it was a preset that was a copy of the first one, and then we edited it, so that gives it a revision number two.
13:55
I'll go ahead and deploy this preset. So I'll go to Workloads, I'll click the plus icon. I have the office preset avail- visible. Next, I'll call this workload for office. Again, making it simple, we click Next and select our targets for workload
14:14
placement. We get our recommendations, and this time, I'm going to pick FlashBlade one. We'll click Next, and Deploy. Now the workload has been deployed. There it is. If I go back to FlashBlade one in the
14:40
Workloads pane, there's my office workload, and here it is, all the details with the two file systems enabled. Now, what if you wanted to use a CLI instead of the GUI? This is a session that's logged in via SSH to FlashBlade. From here, we will look at the preset by using the Pure Preset command.
15:03
I would first do is look at the preset list by using a Pure Preset workload list. This command is gonna tell me what presets are available. If I wanted to, then I could do a download of the preset using Pure Preset workload download, specifying the context, which is the fleet name of US West, and then give it a preset name, which is a general user share warehouse.
15:28
I click Enter, and there's our JSON-formatted preset file. Now, we could just copy and paste that into our editor, and we could just have the output re- redirected to a file. Then we would be able to go ahead and use that and re-upload it into the array. If you're comfortable with using the CLI, then you could use that.
15:46
Otherwise, you can always stay in the GUI. Now, what does downloading presets do for you? Not only allowing you to edit existing presets, but allows you to export your presets and put them into a repository, which could be a GitHub repository, a file share, even a version control system, or a CI/CD pipeline.
16:07
This would allow you to keep a history of presets and use them for more than just automation. Now that we've created the file presets on the FlashBlade and the side of this fleet, we'll go ahead and we'll expand across platform presets across both FlashArray and FlashBlade. That's coming up in the next demonstration video for the Fusion file presets and
16:26
workloads. By upgrading to FlashBlade version four point six point seven or later, you can have this new experience and features available to you instantly with no other configuration necessary. Be sure to check out our Pure360 videos on using Pure Fusion.
16:44
Try out the features by deploying a no hardware required, lab-driven test drive. And while you're at it, head over to the Pure community site, where you'll find not only collaborative discussions, but presets and code that you can use for your infrastructure automations. Stay tuned for more, right here on Pure360.

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