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I'm Jason Langer, and I'm a technical evangelist here at Pure Storage, and I want to show you how easily and quickly you can present new volumes from a Pure Storage flash array to vSphere using the Pure Storage vSphere client plug-in. And whether it be VMFS, Vals, and yes, even NFS, it is simple as just a few mouse clicks. And you don't have to take my word for it. I'm using our publicly available test drive
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labs for this demonstration. So if you choose to, you can walk through these same steps for yourself, but let's get into it. And as you can see here, I'm logged into basically a Windows desktop, I've got our flash array backdrop here, our background.
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And I've gone ahead and opened up Chrome and gone ahead and already logged into both the flash array that we see here, as well as the vSphere client itself. And what I wanted to show you very quickly on the Pure storage flash array in the dashboard under the storage node as you can see there are no volumes, AKA there's no data storage created, and there's no file systems,
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AKA there's no NFS mount points created on this array. So you're going to see this happen through just a couple of mouse clicks using the pure storage plug-in. So if I click over to the vSphere client. I've gone into the pure storage plug-in shortcut just to show that you see Flash array one, which you can kind of see up here in my browser window.
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It's running Purity version 6.8.3, gives us a link, the array URL and then it shows the VAA version of Vasavive because we are gonna show creating a Vals data source of this VAA parian is very important, but let's get on with the show. So if I go on to the vSphere client, let's just go ahead and go into inventory. Into the hosts and clusters view.
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And the cluster we're gonna be working with in this demo is called TD Cluster or test drive cluster, and as you can see here, it has two ESXi hosts in it, ESXI 1 and 2 with a single Linux VM. And on the right for the cluster view, you can see that we only have 2 data stores, right? Again, just trying to show you that there's
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nothing. Nothing happening behind the scenes that you you can't see or we're kind of doing some movie magic here. We just have the local VMFS data stores from ESXI 1 and 2 configured in the environment. So let's create that first data store. So if we right click on TD cluster. And go down to the very bottom of the actions menu to where the pure storage plug-in is,
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and we click on that and basically we want to click create data storage you can see there's some other options here that we will go into in future demos, but let's click on create data store. And to anybody working in a VMware environment, this is a very common screen or common wizard. It's the create data store wizard. So we're not gonna be showing you too much
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different here, right? So on the type, we've got VMFS, we've got Vals, we have NFS. We're gonna go ahead and start with VMFS, so I'll just leave the default checked or, you know, radial selected. I'll click next. We'll use VMFS version 6.
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I'll click next. Uh, let's give the data store a catchy name like Langer, Demo VMFS one, and we'll make it 1 terabyte. We'll click next, we're going to assign it to the cluster. For the storage, we know we're gonna use the flash array, so we'll select that.
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Now this is something that would be a little different depending on if you use pure storage or a different storage vendors, this protection group window comes up. Now this is something that's related to the flash array itself. It's basically servicing up our protection policies that you would create on the array for replication schedules or snapshot schedules or a combination of the both.
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Right, so just know that that's something else that you would potentially under the ray configured that would be surfaced up into the data store level, uh, but for our example, we're just gonna leave the default PG group auto again, which is a default setting from the flash array checked, and we'll just leave it as is, but just know that there's other options that you would do here down the road.
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So let's click next. We're not gonna do anything with the volume group and the QOS, so let's click next, and then we're gonna get the ready to complete stage and it's gonna basically tell you. You know, confirm all your settings. These all look good to me, so we'll click finish.
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And then we'll let the wizard kind of run. And we'll give it a second here, and now we see that we have the Langger demo VMFS datastore mounted at the cluster level, right? We see it's VMFS 6, we see that it's a 1 terabyte, it's free, you know, basically 1 terabytes free.
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So now if I click back over to the flash array, you can see that we have one volume here because it was 0 before it's, you know, we created the new volume. So if we click into that, you see Langer demo VMFS is here, it's 1 terabyte, you know, we can click into it again and we can see some other information, you know, you can see, like I said, it's connected to the DD cluster host group.
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I mentioned the PG, you know, the protection groups you see here it's PG Auto, so on and so forth. So that's how quickly we created a VMFS data store, pretty painless. And it's the same process no matter what if you're doing Vals or NFS. So let's go back to vSphere, the vSphere client. I'll click on TD cluster,
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pure storage, create data store, and this time let's go ahead and choose VAs or Val. So we'll click next. Comput resource, yep, we're gonna select the array, looks good. Now this time you're going to get a Vval configuration which is the storage container, we're going to use the existing container which is the one that's already created on the array,
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so we'll go ahead and select the fault container, click next, we'll give it a catchy name like Langer Demovivals. Say next, can we get the ready to complete, and we will click finish, and this will just take a little bit longer than the VMFS but not by much. So we see that it's creating the VA data store.
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All looks good here. Now the funny thing is, is if we go back onto the flash array. If we go under volumes, we won't see anything here yet because really it's just and this is a vival thing, right? It's just mapping to the container that data store, but there's actually no information in there yet,
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right? It's an empty data store, so if I go back. To vSphere, we see that the Langer Demo Vals has been created, uh, it's 1 terabyte again like what we did, but we didn't see anything on the flash ray site. So let's do a quick storage V motion with this Linux VM. So if I right click on it, do migrate.
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Let's do change storage only, we'll do next. And let's find the VAs. There it is. Our compatibility checks succeed. So let's click next, and we'll click finish. Let's bring up the task window.
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And we see that we're, you know, we're migrating, you know, we're at 26%. But if I go back over to the flasy side. And let's refresh here. Might take a second, there it is.
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So now that we've actually started moving a VM into the Vals container, we now see the Linux VM is there, right? So we can see that it's actually consuming these volumes because remember Vals gives every VM its own container, right? That's that segmentation that Vals is basically known for, right? So you don't get into the traps of VMFS with
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Noisy neighbors and so on and so forth, but that's with vivals, right? Again, very quick, very easy, very painless. And lastly, let's go ahead and configure an NFS data store, which is something relatively new to the Pure storage flash array. So if we go back to the vSphere client, we right click on TD cluster,
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go down to pure storage, click on Create data store, again we get to create data store type screen, we'll select NFS so our options on the left will change a little bit as you see there. We'll click next, compute resource is going to be TD cluster. Flash array one is our storage. We'll give the data store a great name Langer demo NFS,
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uh, we'll give it a one, let's not give it a petabyte, how about we just do a terabyte, right? Um, and we have this option to use a file system that has already been configured for NFS since we don't have anything, we just won't use this one, but if maybe if you had something already mounted or some or something created before you can mount it that way, but this is a net new,
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so we'll just leave it that, we'll click next. Uh, well, we use NFS version 3, but just know that we support 4.1 for those that want the security. For pod, a pod is again that's another pure storage construct where you get into working with pods when you're dealing with replication. I only have a single array in this environment, so don't need to worry about that because we're
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not replicating between, let's say a production site and a DR site. So we'll just say none, we'll click next. For policy, I mean for security-minded folks, this is where you could really get in and lock down who can access these NFS mount points based off IP addresses and so on and so forth. uh, but to simplify this, I'm going just to say unrestricted, click next.
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Enable Autoder is Autoder is a function of the pure storage flash ray that will show you. In a second is basically it's what's going to give you the option to view each VM as its own directory, and the benefit of doing that is now you'll be able to see within the purity UI or the flash array UI per VM performance details, right? So on this linkVM if we move it to the NFS data store, we would see it as its own directory and
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then we would see its VM decays and actually be able to see its performance and so on and so forth. As we added additional VMs, so if we did Linux VM2, VM 3, it'd be the same thing. Each one would have its own directory to make it easier for you to identify and monitor for, you know, latency, bandwidth, capacity, all those things. So we are gonna go ahead and leave Enable
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Autoder checked. As the default, we'll click next, uh, we'll basically see the ready to complete screen, we will click finish. Gives it one second, we say it's creating the data store and voila, we now have the Langer demo NFS data store.
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If I flit over to the flash array, now the thing with now that we're in the flash array, we're not working with volumes, right? Because volumes in in Flash ray speak is a block construct. We now have a file system. So under the storage note, I'm gonna go over to file systems and you now see that I've got the Langer demo NFS so I can click into that.
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There's the directory Langer demo NFS route, so that's the root directory of the um the NFS export, and you can see I've got the export policy, this is what I was talking about before where we can talk about the client, the rules of access, so right now I'm allowing any client, into the asterisk or the wildcard.
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To connect, I've got the no root squash. So if I wanted to lock this down for security reasons. I could edit this rule and put an IP range in and so on and so forth. If also if we went back into policies, you can see that we've got a quota policy. So remember when I created the data source, I set the size at 1 terabyte.
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So now it knows like the quota on this should not be larger than the terabyte and of course as this grows you can set up alerts both either from the flash array side or within the vSphere client. And to kind of show you one last thing about the NFS data source quickly, let's migrate the Linux VM off the VA, so let's do change storage only.
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And let's move it from the Vals over to the NFS. So we'll go ahead and select that, we'll click finish. And we'll give it a second to migrate. OK, we see that it's migrated, it says completed. So let's go back over to the flash array.
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And now when we go into file systems, We see the demo, the root of the Langer demo NFS, which is what we created for the data store, but now we see the Langer demo NFS. Root Linux VM one, so we now have a directory for the Linux VM that you can go into and see, so we could select directory exports, snapshots, quota, so on and so forth,
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but the real power of this is now if I go into the performance. Category of the UI and then I go into directories. Now I can select so I only have the root as well as the Linux VM. If I click on the Linux VM. You can start seeing, now granted, not the best of an example since I just moved it,
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but you can now start seeing the metrics for latency, I ops and bandwidth for this specific VM. Now imagine if you had 100,000 of these VMs that were running on the NFS data where you could now get per VM statistics on on these metric points to help you either isolate problems or to further troubleshoot or so on and so forth, and that's something special that we bring to our NFS data stores when it comes
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to a VMware environment. And with that shown, let's go ahead and wrap up the demo. And there you have it. It really is just that easy, but make sure you check it out for yourself in our test drive labs, and of course, check out all the other amazing demos and videos on Pier 360.
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Thank you for watching.
