Moving to XtremIO (or any other array)

I was recently asked to help move VMs from one datastore backed by traditional spinning disk to an EMC XtremIO datastore.  I was really excited as I wanted to see the power of an all flash array.

As a best practice, most all flash vendors recommend using their own multipathing software (PowerPath/VE) or round robin. In this environment, the customer choose to go with RoundRobin. This is pretty easy to do in the GUI, but you need to do it for each device and on each host in a cluster.  Not to worry, PowerCLI is willing to help.  The following code will find all XtremIO LUNs not currently set to RoundRobin and change them.

Get-VMHost "esx-cl3-*" | Get-VMHostHba -Type "FibreChannel" |
Get-ScsiLun -LunType "disk" |
where {$_.MultipathPolicy -ne "RoundRobin" -and $_.Vendor -eq 'XtremIO'} |
Set-ScsiLun -MultipathPolicy RoundRobin

Once we have the new datastores all prepared and ready to go, we can start moving virtual machines. In the customers environment, two different clusters of ESXi hosts shared a common set of datastores. As part of this migration, the customer wanted to dedicated datastores to each cluster (removing their cross cluster datastores). Again, PowerCLI was willing to help. In the following code, we will move all of the virtual machines from MyOldDataStore that are on a host whose name matches esx-cl3. We will sort the virtual machines by name, just for tracking purposes and kick out an email when the process is complete (just so we don’t have to babysit the process):

Get-Datastore MyOldDataStore | Get-VM | ?{$_.VMHost.Name -match 'esx-cl3'} | Sort Name | %{
write-host "$($_.Name) will be moved to XtremIO..." -NoNewline
[void]( $_ | Move-VM -Datastore xtrem-cl3-vol1 -DiskStorageFormat:EagerZeroedThick )
Write-Host " done!"
}
Send-MailMessage -To 'notify@mydomainname.com' -Subject "Done with CL3 group" -From 'notify@mydomainname.com' -SmtpServer 'smtp.mydomainname.com'

That was pretty easy, and now the VMs will benefit from the consistent low-latency of an all flash array. Now you probably need some help managing and monitoring your array. Fortunately the team over at vNugglets have you covered. Check out their latest post at http://www.vnugglets.com/2014/04/xtremio-powershell-module-report-on.html. It is a fantastic module and really worth checking out.