Intro I’d like to address the rumor—which I apparently started myself—that I am the official RDM evangelist. That couldn’t be further from the truth. In that same spirit, I thought this was a great opportunity to show how I’ve helped customers migrate off of RDMs. This particular customer wanted to move away from RDMs as […]
How-to: Convert a vVol Data Disk to an RDM After a Storage vMotion
From vVols to RDMs: A Strategic Migration Guide The announcement of vVol deprecation in VCF 9.0 had sysadmins everywhere checking their calendars to make sure it wasn’t April 1st. Nope, it’s just another Tuesday in IT, where ‘stable’ is a four-letter word and your five-year plan now has a shelf life of about five minutes. […]
Raw Device Mappings Aren’t That Bad… Change My Mind!
Intro Okay, you see the title, and I know what you’re thinking: ‘This guy’s about to defend a technology that belongs in a museum next to a dial-up modem.’ And you’re not wrong to be skeptical. For years, the industry has treated Raw Device Mappings (RDMs) like a fossil from the Jurassic period, a relic […]
Beat the Final Boss: A Unofficial Guide to Proxmox & Windows TPM Snapshots on Pure NFS
Intro Ah, the hypervisor migration. That special project where you trade a familiar environment for a brave new world of command lines and wiki pages. It’s all fun and games until you hit those Day 2 operations that were once muscle memory. Suddenly you need to recover that critical, TPM-enabled Windows VM after an admin […]
Migrating FlashArray iSCSI Networks: A Practical Guide for vSphere Admins
Let’s be honest, one of the biggest cheat codes in IT is working directly with customers. They have a knack for asking the best questions! The kind that skip the theory and get straight to the practical, real-world challenges. Learning a new technology can make me feel like I’m fumbling around in the dark, but […]
The Unofficial Proxmox & Pure Storage Cookbook: NFS with nconnect
This blog provides the unofficial steps to configure Proxmox VE to use an NFS share from a Pure Storage FlashArray. Configuring this will allow you to have a shared volume for your proxmox hosts so that you can leverage features like High Availability. I will also include performance optimization with nconnect. This is my preferred […]
The Unofficial Proxmox & Pure Storage Cookbook: iSCSI with Multipathing
In this blog we will be setting up ProxMox with Pure Storage as a central iSCSI LVM device that provides shared storage for a Datacenter Cluster. Pure Storage has done alot of work on this and you can find official documentation at https://support.purestorage.com/bundle/m_proxmox/page/Solutions/Proxmox/topics/t_connecting_proxmox_to_flasharray.html. It’s my personal opinion that NFS is far easier to setup and […]
A Guide to Manual vVol Replication and Recovery on Pure Storage (Without SRM)
Introduction vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols) simplify storage management by enabling joint control between the storage array and vCenter for deploying and managing volumes. This integration, however, introduces new operational workflows. This blog outlines the manual process for configuring vVol replication and recovering Virtual Machines (VMs) on a secondary site without utilizing Site Recovery Manager/Live Site […]
Cloning vVols VMs from Snapshots on Pure Storage in vCenter
One of the exciting parts of joining Pure was getting back to a full-featured storage product with snapshots. I know to some that sounds about as thrilling as hold music on a customer service line. But as someone with a history in storage, I went through a period where I covered products that were seriously […]
Cloud Migration Challenges: AVS & HCX Practical Troubleshooting Tips
** Heads up that this was written before AVS Gen 2 (Fleet in vNet) really existed. This is mostly relevant to AVS “Gen 1 (ExR connected)” on vSphere/vCenter 7 & 8, and less than HCX 4.11. ** Intro Making a career change has given me time to reflect on the last 3–4 years I’ve spent […]