I’m not a developer. I deal mainly with infrastructe, things like virtualization, storage & backup, networking etc. Sometimes I had to write scripts, primarily PowerShell, batch or Bash. Many years back, I also wrote Csh and Ksh scripts. In the past years, automation was one of the rising trends in the infrastructure segment. And with automation, new challenges came up. Today I have to work with Windows PowerShell, in case of VMware with PowerCLI (which bases on Windows PowerShell), and sometimes I have use with REST APIs.

Careful preparation is a key element to success. If you restart a storage controller, or even the whole storage, you should be very sure that all ESXi hosts have enough paths to every datstore. Sure, you can use the VMware vSphere C# client or the Web Client to check every host and every datastore. But if you have a large cluster with a dozen datastores and some Raw Device Mappings (RDMs), this can take a looooong time.

DataCore describes in their Host Configuration Guide for VMware ESXi some settings that must be adjusted before storage from DataCore SANsymphony-V storage servers will be assigned to the ESXi hosts. Today, for ESXi 5.x and 6.0, you have to add a custom rule and adjust the advanced setting DiskMaxIOSize. For ESX(i) 4 more parameters had to be adjusted. But I will focus on ESXi 5.x and 6.0. You need to adjust these settings for each host that should get storage mapped from a DataCore storage server.

Disk space is rare. I only have about 1 TB of SSD storage in my lab and I don’t like to waste too much of it. My hosts use NFS to connect to my Synology NAS, and even if I use the VAAI-NAS plugin, I use thin-provisioned disks only. Thin-provisioned disks tend to grow over time. If you copy a 1 GB file into a VM and you delete this file immediately, you will find that the VMDK is increased by 1 GB.