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Using FlashArray File Services as Principal Storage for VMware Cloud Foundation

Walkthrough of deploying a VMware Cloud Foundation environment using an Everpure FlashArray NFSv3 datastore—from setup to verification.
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00:00
Hello and welcome to another installment of Pier 360. I'm going to be your host today. My name is Matthew Webb. Today we're gonna look at how you can utilize FlashArray in a VMware Cloud Foundation environment or VCF. So, without wasting any more time, let's jump straight into it.
00:20
VCF 9.0 was released earlier this summer as the first major software VMware released under the Brockha umbrella. FlashArray is supported in VCF environment because VCF supports two external storage types. The first one's fiber channel and the second is storage type is NFS v3.
00:39
In VMware, both are supported storage types, but only after you've deployed the VCF environment. So we're talking about the data store types that are supported in the initial installation of VCF. So that's what we're gonna do today. We're going to go over an NFS deployment on, with VCF and FlashArray.
00:58
So we're gonna start off in the Purity operating system. We're logged in here already. We're gonna head over to Storage and we're gonna start making our NFS data store we're gonna use for this new VCF installation. So, I'm gonna head over to File Systems.
01:11
I'm going to click this plus icon, and I'm gonna go ahead and fill out the name for my file system. Oh, all right. All right, so we're gonna create that. So we're not ready just yet. We need to make an export policy and then we'd
01:37
also like to do an autodi directory policy to make this usable. Export policy is going to be a requirement to actually export, the NFS share, and then auto directory is not a requirement but usually best practice. It gives us a neat functionality of making managed directories for each virtual machine that gets created in vCenter.
01:56
And so yeah, it gives us more granular control around snapshots and also better monitoring features on a per-VM level. So let's start with that export policy. Let's head over to our export policies. We do have one already created, so I'm going to click into the VMware export policy. You can see some of the settings that we have here, but we're going to add our directory to
02:14
So if I search for the one I just created, here it is here, and make sure it's enabled, uh, and then I'm gonna make the uh export name the same. Same. All right, so we're almost there. We're, uh, last thing we're gonna do is, uh, head on over back to policies, and then add our VMware auto directory policy.
02:44
So we've got one created here, we can see that Autodirectories is enabled and then set to true, and now we're gonna go find that. Uh, our new file system. And add that in there. Perfect. All right, so if I go in here, I can see that
03:04
I've got the auto directory policy and I've got my export policy. My export policy. We're enabled, so we're pretty much set. So now we're gonna pop on over into uh the VCF installer. Uh, so this part is, um, got a lot of fields to fill out for fully qualified domain names and DNS settings,
03:23
things that just don't really pertain to storage. So what we're gonna do is some movie magic. I'm gonna speed us along to the part we care about. OK, so now we're on the storage screen which we care the most about. So we're gonna go ahead and select uh NFS V3.
04:14
And we're gonna get the IP address of our NFS mount. And pop that in there. And then we're gonna put our Sharemount information in here. Cool. So now we're gonna skip ahead past these other sections and see what the install looks like.
05:04
OK, so we filled out all our fields, we got our storage configuration. Uh, the last thing we need to do here is actually just acknowledge a couple of these warnings. Uh, they're not preventing us from going, and we're gonna go ahead and click deploy. Now this, this part takes the longest amount of time.
05:18
Um, there's really the complete abstantiation of the system, so that's gonna take anywhere between 4 to 5 hours. So I'll just see on the other side of this and we'll look at the install. OK, great. So now we've got our VCF installer up on our screen, uh, and we can see that it's pretty much completed everything.
05:37
We did have one error on the automation appliance that we can go troubleshoot later, but ultimately we've got our VCF completely, uh, substantiated, ready to roll, so I could go log into um ops here. And, uh, verify the installation. And so what we're really looking for is just our storage configurations,
06:09
see that, um, everything's deployed, all the components that make up VCF have been deployed, we can actually go in and see that our data store that we configured is right here for that NFS data store we created on Purity. And then, of course, if we want to go into the, uh, the VCF vCenter environment. We could do that and also, uh, confirm that all the tooling that we had for
06:33
VCF is also deployed right there on that data store. Cool. So you can see, uh, you know, NSX, ops, the vCenter all deployed, and, uh, they're using our new NFS data store, uh, that, uh, that we created. So there you have it. Uh, that is, uh, deploying an NFS v3 data store on FlashArray.
07:01
Thanks for tuning in to another Pier 360 video. I'll catch you on the next one.
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