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Hello and welcome to another Pure 360 walkthrough video. In this video we're going to cover the steps needed to present an SMB file share from a Pure storage flash array system to be used as a Vee backup repository. This will be a fun one, so let's dive in. Since the release of file services for Flash array, one of the top questions that I get from
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VM users is, can I use an SMB share from a Flash array as a Vee repository? The short answer to that is yes, and we're going to step through that full process in this video today. So I've gone ahead and I'm already logged into my flash array system in my lab environment that we're going to be using. And once you get logged in, you're gonna want to go ahead and go over to the Storage tab here
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on the left, and we're gonna be working with the file systems and the Policy menu items here that you see on the far right of this menu bar. Now to start with, we're going to focus on policies, and I'm not going to be giving this like a full detail of FA files. I'm gonna kind of show you enough for what you need to do to get this up and running, but for further details,
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check out videos on Pure 360 for more of a deep dive into Flash array file services and everything that it has to offer. So with that said, the two policies that we're gonna be focusing on for today's video are the export policies and the quota policy, and the export policy is basically what you're going to allow to access or be presented off the Flash array system.
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So we could use this department share export that I've used for previous videos, but just for, uh, for completeness, let's just go and create a new one just so you can see what that's like. So on the far right, I'm gonna go ahead and click the plus sign here. And since we're gonna be using an SMB share for the type,
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I'm just gonna go ahead and hit the drop down and select SMB and then let's just call this, um, SMBV. For the policy name, we do want it enabled and for our use case, for what we're using it for, we do not need to turn on access-based enumeration nor are we worried about continuous availability. Again, those are features that I go into
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further detail on a Flash array file systems video that you can find on Pure 360 if you want to know more. So go ahead and just click create and just like that we have the export policy created, but what we really need to do is go in there and add the access rules to this policy. So if I click on SMB-Ve, you'll see here I've got no members.
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Which will be the file system that we're going to add later. But then I don't have any rules. It says here no rules are found. So on the far right, I'm gonna go ahead and click the plus sign. And I'm just going to leave the default of the wildcard. I'm just gonna say anybody can have access to this, but as you see kind of in this gray like
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example box, you could use IP addresses, subnet masks, host names, whatever you want in that regard from a networking perspective to kind of lock down who has access to this. But for what we're trying to do, using the wildcard is fine, and I will not be turning on anonymous access allowed nor the SMB encryption is required
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because we just don't really need those for this example. So let's go and click add. And just like that we have our rules in our export policy. Now the next policy that we're going to create, and it's not necessarily required, but I would strongly encourage it, is we want to create a quota policy.
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And the reason for that is if we didn't add a quota policy to our file share when the system was accessing it, it would just see all the space that's available to it on the array. So if you want to be able to kind of lock it down and say, hey, don't go above, for example, we're going to create a terabyte quota, you need to create this quota policy and assign it to the file system,
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which is exactly what we're going to do. So go ahead and click the plus sign here. We're going to give it a name; we'll call it a quota beam, and then we do want to obviously enable it, so we'll leave that checked. Go ahead and click create.
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And just like the export policy, we have the policy created, but we need to click into it to actually configure it. So we'll click into it. Again, you see no members are assigned because we haven't assigned it to anything yet. Uh, then we're going to go into the rules. So go ahead and click on the plus sign to the
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right. Uh, let's say like I said, 1 terabyte, so I'll put 1 and then over here on the right, you've got the drop down, you've got megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, so on and so forth. So we're gonna go ahead and select the T for terabyte. Uh, for notifications, we can just say user if we wanted to.
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Now, the enforce is an interesting one that I, you know, depending on your scenario, you might want to check. Cause when if it's enforced, that means once you hit that limit, if it's enforced, that means once you hit that limit, you cannot surpass it, meaning the moment you're trying to write that 1.1 terabyte or next terabyte of data or piece of data, it's going to error out and say sorry,
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the device is full, and in this case, it would, you know, crash your backup job or fail your backup job. If you leave it unchecked, what happens is with this notification, the backup jobs would continue to run going past that 1 terabyte quota limit. You just get a notification saying, hey, just so you know,
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you're now at 110% of your quota, or you're using X amount of data over your quota. So depending on how you want this to behave in your VM environment, you may or may not want it enforced. I would probably lean towards enforced because I would rather have the jobs fail. So I'm probably gonna get more notifications from VM or pay a little,
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maybe a little bit more attention to those if I see those. So with that said, we'll go and click add. And just like that, we've got all the policies ready to go, so click up here and you see we got the VV policy for quotas and for exports. Now the next thing we need to do is create the file system that we're going to be
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presenting to our VM backup server. So I'll go over here to file systems. This is a pretty straightforward process. So file systems, I mean, I could use this department share, but let's go ahead and create a new one again for completeness. So on the far right, I'll click the plus sign. And I'm just gonna name this Verepo super creative name,
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click create and just like that we've got the file system and now we see the directory, see this root directory down here in the bottom. So just like with the policies, once we have the object created, we want to click into it and start assigning things to it. So we're going to click into the V root and the thing that we want to apply are those policies
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that we created. So here on policies at the very top we're gonna go all the way to the right and we're gonna click on this little burger menu here. And then with the drop down and we've got all the ad export policies, snapshot policies, quota policies, so on and so forth. So first thing we want to do is let's go ahead and add the export policy.
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And then let's call, we'll just call this V. Repo, uh, export. We want it enabled and then the SNP policy is the SNP beam that we created before, so once select that, we'll click add. And now we've got the directory export out that now can be accessed.
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With all of our policies set, we're now ready to use this file system as our VM backup repository. So we're gonna go ahead and close out of our Purity console and then we're gonna go and go into the VM backup and replication console, which I've already logged into. Now on the left hand side down here, the next thing we want to do is go down into backup
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infrastructure. And then on the left hand side over here select backup repositories, and then just go ahead and click on add repository, and that will come up, and then from the pick list we're just gonna go and select network attached storage. And then we're gonna select SMB share for this example and let's go ahead and give it a catchy
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name, I'll call it SMB. Demo. Say next. So for the shared folder, it's going to be FA file, which is the name of the system that we gave it with an active directory, and then our V repo export. And then for my share credentials, I'm just gonna go ahead and use my active directory
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account, of course, in your environment, use the appropriate login creds to access the share that you've set up, and then we're just gonna click next. And you'll see there it's found the path and it's showing the size of the repository or the capacity. You see here it says 1,024 gigabytes. Now this is having to do because we created that quota policy for 1 terabyte.
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If we did not create that quota policy, what we would see here is it would actually just report back whatever amount of space is free on the array, because we weren't locking it down or limiting to a certain amount of space. So this is why the importance of that quota policy is there. There, we'll just click next.
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Uh, I'm fine with the mount server and my instant recovery, so I'll just click next. If this is a sensor to detect previously installed components, apparently. And as you can see here, we're on the review screen where it basically tells me everything already exists, so I'll just go ahead and click apply,
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and this will just take a couple of seconds for it to kind of run through; it's being processed. So I'll just go and pause the video here and I'll be right back. All right, and we're back, and as you can see here, Vams ran through all of its steps and everything has finished successfully, so I'll go ahead and click next, click finish, and just like that, I've got my SMB repo ready to use.
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So let's go ahead and test it out. Let's go up to home, and I've already got a backup job here created. I've called it SMB demo. Let's go ahead and check the properties of it just to verify everything. So if we go down here to storage, you'll see that I'm pointing to,
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or let's change it to the SMB repo demo location. I'll just leave all the other defaults here for now. Let's go ahead and just run this job once we're finished. We'll let that kick off and it's gonna start up. And as you can see, it's building the list of processes, you know,
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for our previous video we installed the universal storage adapter from Pure Storage, so we'll see the storage snapshots being used as the offload, and then the backup is going to go ahead and run as normal and complete as normal. I'll spare you the details on that and I'll come right back to show you the finished product and wrap this video up.
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All right, and we're back because the backup job has finished and I wanted to leave the job details pinned up just for a second so you can see that with using the Pure Storage plug-in, you see creating storage snapshots for backup and then deleting the storage snapshots for backup. So as you can see, we were definitely offloading the backup work to the storage array as opposed to the traditional backup
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jobs, right, going through the proxy servers and whatnot. So let's go ahead and click OK. The next thing I want to do is actually just show you that the data was written to the SMB directory or repo. So let's go to the backup infrastructure. And as you'll see here, we have the SMB repo demo at the top,
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and we basically used 8 gigs as a very small VM for backups as well as Duplicity and everything else. So as you can see, we did successfully write to this SMB repository with our RVM backup job. And it's just that easy. That's how quickly you can configure an SMB file share to be used as a VM repository when using FlashArray File Services in conjunction with your VM backup infrastructure.
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Appreciate you watching, but stay tuned for more videos on Pure Storage, and I hope you have a great day.
