Web Guide: FlashArray® VMware Best Practices

 This document is not directly updated, rather it is updated indirectly when changes are made to the backing
documentation. While the updated date may reflect an older date on this page, this information is actively
maintained and should be considered the most recent best practices unless otherwise noted.

Executive Summary
This document describes the best practices for using the Pure Storage® FlashArray in VMware vSphere® 5.5+ and 6.0+
environments. While the Pure Storage FlashArray includes general support for a wide variety of VMware products, this
guide will focus on best practices concerning VMware ESXi® and VMware vCenter™. This paper will provide guidance
and recommendations for ESXi and vCenter settings and features that provide the best performance, value and
efficiency when used with the Pure Storage FlashArray.

Goals and Objectives

This document is intended to provide understanding and insight into any pertininant best practices when using VMware
vSphere with the Pure Storage FlashArray. Options or configurations that are to be left at the default are generally not
mentioned and therefore recommendations for default values should be assumed. Changing or altering parameters not
mentioned in this guide may in fact be supported but are likely not recommended in most cases and should be
considered on a case-by-case basis. Please contact Pure Storage and/or VMware support in those situations.

Please note that this will be updated frequently, so for the most up-to-date version and other VMware information please
refer to the following page on the Pure Storage support site.

https://support.purestorage.com/Solutions/Virtualization/VMware

Audience
This document is intended for use by VMware and/or storage administrators who want to deploy the Pure Storage
FlashArray in VMware vSphere-based virtualized datacenters. A working familiarity with VMware products and concepts
is recommended.

©2020 Copyright Pure Storage. All rights reserved.

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Best Practice Checklist
The Best Practice checklist is available here. Please refer to it when configuring a VMware® environment for the Pure
Storage® FlashArray. All settings that are not mentioned here should remain set to the default. Please refer to Pure
Storage and/or VMware support when considering changes to settings not mentioned below. A setting not mentioned
here indicates that Pure Storage does not generally have a specific recommendation for that setting and recommends
either the VMware default or to just follow the guidance of VMware.

A PowerCLI script to check and set certain best practices can be found here:

https://github.com/codyhosterman/powercli/blob/master/bestpractices.ps1

A script to just check for best practices can be found here:

https://github.com/codyhosterman/powercli/blob/master/bestpracticechecker.ps1

For detailed description on both scripts, refer to this post:

http://www.codyhosterman.com/2016/05/updated-flasharray-vmware-best-practices-powercli-scripts/

FlashArray and VMware Integration

This document is focused on core ESXi and vCenter best practices to ensure the best performance at scale and to
explain management techniques to maintain the heath of your VMware vSphere environment on FlashArray storage.

Many of the techniques and operations can be simplified, automated and enhanced through Pure Storage integration
with various VMware products:

1. FlashArray Management Plugin for VMware vSphere Web Client

2. FlashArray Storage Replication Adapter for VMware Site Recovery Manager™
3. FlashArray Plugin for VMware vRealize® Orchestrator™
4. FlashArray Management Pack for VMware vRealize Operations Manager™
5. FlashArray Content Pack for VMware vRealize Log Insight™

Detailed description of these integrations are beyond the scope of this document, but further details can be found at
https://support.purestorage.com/Solutions/Virtualization/VMware.

©2020 Copyright Pure Storage. All rights reserved.

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FlashArray Configuration

Host and Host Group Creation

This section describes the recommendations for creating provisioning objects (called hosts and host groups) on the
FlashArray. The purpose is to outline the proper configuration for general understanding. It is important to note though,
that the FlashArray vSphere Web Client Plugin will automate all of the following tasks for you and is therefore is a
recommended mechanism for doing so.

The FlashArray has two object types for volume provisioning, hosts and host groups:

• Host—a host is a collection of initiators (iSCSI IQNs or Fibre Channel WWNs) that refers to a physical host. A
FlashArray host object must have a one to one relationship with an ESXi host. Every active initiator for a given ESXi
host should be added to the respective FlashArray host object. If an initiator is not yet zoned (for instance), and not
intended to be, it can be omitted from the FlashArray host object. Furthermore, while the FlashArray supports
multiple protocols for a single host (a mixture of FC and iSCSI), ESXi does not support presenting VMFS storage
via more than one protocol. So creating a multi-protocol host object should be avoided on the FlashArray when in
use with VMware ESXi.

In the example below, the ESXi host has two online Fibre Channel HBAs with WWNs of 20:00:00:25:B5:11:11:1C
and 20:00:00:25:B5:44:44:1C.

• Host Group—a host group is a collection of host objects. Pure Storage recommends grouping your ESXi hosts into
clusters within vCenter—as this provides a variety of benefits like High Availability and Dynamic Resource
Scheduling. In order to provide simple provisioning, Pure Storage also recommends creating host groups that
correspond to VMware clusters. Therefore, with every VMware cluster that will use FlashArray storage, a respective
host group should be created. Every ESXi host that is in the cluster should have a corresponding host (as described

©2020 Copyright Pure Storage. All rights reserved.

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 above) that is added to a host group. The host group and its respective cluster should have the same number of
hosts. It is recommended to not have more or less hosts in the host group as is in the cluster. While it is supported
to have an unmatching count, it makes cluster-based provisioning simpler, and a variety of orchestration
integrations require these to match. So it is highly recommended to do so.

 BEST PRACTICE: Match FlashArray hosts groups with vCenter clusters.

 Be Aware that moving a host out of a host group will disconnect the host from any volume that is connected to
the host group. Doing so will cause PDLs to any datastores that are using the Volumes connected to that
Host Group.

Setting the FlashArray “ESXi” Host Personality

 DO NOT make this change online. If an ESXi host is running VMs on the array you are setting the host
personality on, data unavailability can occur. A fabric logout and login may occur and accidental permanent
device loss can occur. To avoid this possibility, only set this personality on hosts that are in maintenance
mode or are not actively using that array.

In Purity 5.1 and later, there is a new host personality type for VMware ESXi hosts. Changing a host personality on a
host object on the FlashArray causes the array to change some of its behavior for specific host types.

In general, we endeavor inside of Purity to automatically behave in the correct way without specific configuration
changes. Due to a variety of host types supported and varying requirements (a good example is SCSI interaction for
features like ActiveCluster) a manual configuration was required.

In Purity 5.1, it is recommended to enable the “ESXi” host personality for all host objects that represent ESXi hosts.

The ESXi personality does the following things as of Purity 5.1.0:

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Makes the FlashArray issue a Permanent Device Loss SCSI sense response to ESXi when a pod goes offline due to a
mediator loss. If this is not set, no response is sent and vSphere HA does not detect the failure properly and will not
restart VMs running on the failed hosts.

ESXi uses peripheral LUN IDs instead of flat LUN IDs—this changes how ESXi views any LUN ID on the FlashArray
above 255. Since ESXi does not properly interpret flat LUN IDs, it sees LUN ID higher than 255 to be 16,383 higher than
it should be (256 is seen as 16,639) which is outside of the supported range of ESXi. Setting the ESXi personality on the
FlashArray for a given host switches the FlashArray LUN methodology to peripheral, allowing ESXi to see LUN IDs
higher than 255.

While this personality change is currently only relevant for specific ActiveCluster environments and/or environments that
want to use higher-than-255 LUN IDs, it is still recommended to set this on all ESXi host objects. Moving forward other
behavior changes for ESXi might be included and doing it now ensures it is not missed when it might be important for
your environment.

 BEST PRACTICE: Set FlashArray host objects to have the FlashArray “ESXi” host personality when using
Purity 5.1 or later. This change is NOT required for all environments (beyond the ones mentioned above), but
it is recommended to set it when you have a chance.

The ESXi host personality can be set through the FlashArray GUI, the CLI or REST. To set it via the GUI, click on
Storage, then Hosts, then the host you would like to configure:

Next, go to the Details pane and click the vertical ellipsis and choose Set Personality…:

Choose the radio button corresponding to ESXi and then click Save.

©2020 Copyright Pure Storage. All rights reserved.

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 Connecting Volumes to Hosts
A FlashArray volume can be connected to either host objects or host groups. If a volume is intended to be shared by the
entire cluster, it is recommended to connect the volume to the host group, not the individual hosts. The makes
provisioning easier and helps ensure the entire ESXi cluster has access to the volume. Generally, volumes that are
intended to host virtual machines, should be connected at the host group level.

Private volumes, like ESXi boot volumes, should not be connected to the host group as they do not (and should not) be
shared. These volumes should be connected to the host object instead.

Pure Storage has no requirement on LUN IDs for VMware ESXi environments, and users should, therefore, rely on the
automatic LUN ID selection built into Purity.

©2020 Copyright Pure Storage. All rights reserved.

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SAN Design and Setup
For zoning recommendations and best practices, please refer to the following articles (and others) on
support.purestorage.com:

https://support.purestorage.com/Solutions/SAN/Best_Practices/SAN_Guidelines_for_Maximizing_Pure_Performance

https://support.purestorage.com/Solutions/SAN/Configuration/Introduction_to_Fibre_Channel_and_Zoning

VMware ESXi Host Configuration

This section reviews the recommended configuration of ESXi hosts for use with the Pure Storage FlashArray.

VMware Native Multipathing Plugin (NMP) Configuration

VMware offers a Native Multipathing Plugin (NMP) layer in vSphere through Storage Array Type Plugins (SATP) and
Path Selection Policies (PSP) as part of the VMware APIs for Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA). The SATP has all
the knowledge of the storage array to aggregate I/Os across multiple channels and has the intelligence to send failover
commands when a path has failed. The Path Selection Policy can be either “Fixed”, “Most Recently Used” or “Round
Robin”.

Round Robin Path Selection Policy

To best leverage the active-active nature of the front end of the FlashArray, Pure Storage requires that you configure
FlashArray volumes to use the Round Robin Path Selection Policy. The Round Robin PSP rotates between all
discovered paths for a given volume which allows ESXi (and therefore the virtual machines running on the volume) to
maximize the possible performance by using all available resources (HBAs, target ports, etc.).

 BEST PRACTICE: Use the Round Robin Path Selection Policy for FlashArray volumes.

Tuning Round Robin - the I/O Operations Limit

The Round Robin Path Selection Policy allows for additional tuning of its path-switching behavior in the form of a setting
called the I/O Operations Limit. The I/O Operations Limit (sometimes called the “IOPS” value) dictates how often ESXi
switches logical paths for a given device. By default, when Round Robin is enabled on a device, ESXi will switch to a
new logical path every 1,000 I/Os. In other words, ESXi will choose a logical path, and start issuing all I/Os for that
device down that path. Once it has issued 1,000 I/Os for that device, down that path, it will switch to a new logical path
and so on.

©2020 Copyright Pure Storage. All rights reserved.

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Pure Storage recommends tuning this value down to the minimum of 1. This will cause ESXi to change logical paths
after every single I/O, instead of 1,000.

This recommendation is made for a few reasons:

1. Performance. Often the reason cited to change this value is performance. While this is true in certain cases, the
performance impact of changing this value is not usually profound (generally in the single digits of percentage
performance increase). While changing this value from 1,000 to 1 can improve performance, it generally will not
solve a major performance problem. Regardless, changing this value can improve performance in some use
cases, especially with iSCSI.
2. Path Failover Time. It has been noted in testing that ESXi will fail logical paths much more quickly when this value
is set to a the minimum of 1. During a physical failure of the storage environment (loss of a HBA, switch, cable,
port, controller) ESXi, after a certain period of time, will fail any logical path that relies on that failed physical
hardware and will discontinue attempting to use it for a given volume. This failure does not always happen
immediately. When the I/O Operations Limit is set to the default of 1,000 path failover time can sometimes be in
the 10s of seconds which can lead to noticeable disruption in performance during this failure. When this value is
set to the minimum of 1, path failover generally decreases to sub-ten seconds. This greatly reduces the impact of a
physical failure in the storage environment and provides greater performance resiliency and reliability.
3. FlashArray Controller I/O Balance. When Purity is upgraded on a FlashArray, the following process is observed (at
a high level): upgrade Purity on one controller, reboot it, wait for it to come back up, upgrade Purity on the other
controller, reboot it and you’re done. Due to the reboots, twice during the process half of the FlashArray front-end
ports go away. Because of this, we want to ensure that all hosts are actively using both controllers prior to
upgrade. One method that is used to confirm this is to check the I/O balance from each host across both
controllers. When volumes are configured to use Most Recently Used, an imbalance of 100% is usually observed
(ESXi tends to select paths that lead to the same front end port for all devices). This then means additional
troubleshooting to make sure that host can survive a controller reboot. When Round Robin is enabled with the
default I/O Operations Limit, port imbalance is improved to about 20-30% difference. When the I/O Operations
Limit is set to 1, this imbalance is less than 1%. This gives Pure Storage and the end user confidence that all hosts
are properly using all available front end ports.

For these three above reasons, Pure Storage highly recommends altering the I/O Operations Limit to 1.

 BEST PRACTICE: Change the Round Robin I/O Operations Limit from 1,000 to 1 for FlashArray volumes.
(VMware KB regarding setting the IOPs Limit)

ESXi Express Patch 5 or 6.5 Update 1 and later

Starting with ESXi 6.0 Express Patch 5 (build 5572656) and later (Release notes) and ESXi 6.5 Update 1 (build
5969303) and later (release notes), Round Robin and an I/O Operations limit is the default configuration for all Pure
Storage FlashArray devices (iSCSI and Fibre Channel) and no configuration is required.

A new default SATP rule, provided by VMware by default was specifically built for the FlashArray to Pure Storage’s best
practices. Inside of ESXi you will see a new system rule:

VMW_SATP_ALUA PURE FlashArray system VMW_PSP_RR iops=1

For information, refer to this blog post:

©2020 Copyright Pure Storage. All rights reserved.

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https://www.codyhosterman.com/2017/0...e-now-default/

Prior to ESXi 6.0 Express Patch 5 or 6.5 Update 1

The Pure Storage FlashArray is seen by VMware ESXi as an ALUA-compliant array. The FlashArray advertises all paths
as optimized for doing I/Os (active/optimized). When a FlashArray is connected to an ESXi farm and storage is
provisioned, FlashArray volumes get claimed by the “VMW_SATP_ALUA” SATP.

The default pathing policy for the ALUA SATP is the Most Recently Used (MRU) Path Selection Policy. With this PSP,
ESXi will use the first identified path for a volume until that path goes away, or it is manually told to use a different path.
For a variety of reasons this is not the ideal configuration for FlashArray volumes—most notably of which is
performance.

Note that Round Robin is the default in 6.0 Patch 5 and later in the 6.0 code branch, and in 6.5 Update 1 and later in the
6.5 code branch.

Configuring Round Robin and the I/O Operations Limit

If you are running earlier than ESXi 6.0 Express Patch 5 or 6.5 Update 1, there are a variety of ways to configure Round
Robin and the I/O Operations Limit. This can be set on a per-device basis and as every new volume is added, these
options can be set against that volume. This is not a particularly good option as one must do this for every new volume,
which can make it easy to forget, and must do it on every host for every volume. This makes the chance of exposure to
mistakes quite large.

The recommended option for configuring Round Robin and the correct I/O Operations Limit is to create a rule that will
cause any new FlashArray device that is added in the future to that host to automatically get the Round Robin PSP and
an I/O Operation Limit value of 1.

The following command creates a rule that achieves both of these for only Pure Storage FlashArray devices:

esxcli storage nmp satp rule add -s "VMW_SATP_ALUA" -V "PURE" -M "FlashArray" -P "VMW_PSP_RR" -O
"iops=1" -e "FlashArray SATP Rule"

This must be repeated for each ESXi host.

This can also be accomplished through PowerCLI. Once connected to a vCenter Server this script will iterate through all
of the hosts in that particular vCenter and create a default rule to set Round Robin for all Pure Storage FlashArray
devices with an I/O Operation Limit set to 1

$creds = Get-Credential
Connect-VIServer -Server <vCenter> -Credential $creds
$hosts = get-vmhost
foreach ($esx in $hosts)
{
$esxcli=get-esxcli -VMHost $esx -v2
$satpArgs = $esxcli.storage.nmp.satp.rule.remove.createArgs()
$satpArgs.description = "Pure Storage FlashArray SATP Rule"

©2020 Copyright Pure Storage. All rights reserved.

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 $satpArgs.model = "FlashArray"
$satpArgs.vendor = "PURE"
$satpArgs.satp = "VMW_SATP_ALUA"
$satpArgs.psp = "VMW_PSP_RR"
$satpArgs.pspoption = "iops=1"
$esxcli.storage.nmp.satp.rule.add.invoke($satpArgs)
}

Furthermore, this can be configured using vSphere Host Profiles:

It is important to note that existing, previously presented devices will need to be manually set to Round Robin and an I/O
Operation Limit of 1. Optionally, the ESXi host can be rebooted so that it can inherit the multipathing configuration set
forth by the new rule.

For setting a new I/O Operation Limit on an existing device, see Appendix I: Per-Device NMP Configuration.

 BEST PRACTICE: Use a SATP rule to configure multipathing for FlashArray volumes.

Note that I/O Operations of 1 is the default in 6.0 Patch 5 and later in the 6.0 code branch, and in 6.5 Update 1 and later
in the 6.5 code branch.

Verifying Connectivity
It is important to verify proper connectivity prior to implementing production workloads on a host or volume. This consists
of a few steps:

1. Verifying proper multipathing settings in ESXi.

2. Verifying the proper numbers of paths
3. Verifying I/O balance and redundancy on the FlashArray

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The Path Selection Policy and number of paths can be verified easily inside of the vSphere Web Client.

This will report the path selection policy and the number of logical paths. The number of logical paths will depend on the
number of HBAs, zoning and the number of ports cabled on the FlashArray.

The I/O Operations Limit cannot be checked from the vSphere Web Client—it can only be verified or altered via
command line utilities. The following command can check a particular device for the PSP and I/O Operations Limit:

esxcli storage nmp device list -d naa.<device NAA>

Please remember that each of these settings are a per-host setting, so while a volume might be configured properly on
one host, it may not be correct on another. The PowerCLI script below can help you verify this at scale in a simple way.

https://github.com/codyhosterman/powercli/blob/master/bestpracticechecker.ps1

It is also possible to check multipathing from the FlashArray.

A CLI command exists to monitor I/O balance coming into the array:

purehost monitor --balance --interval <how long to sample> --repeat <how many iterations>

The command will report a few things:

1. The host name

2. The individual initiators from the host. If they are logged into more than one FlashArray port, it will be reported
more than once. If an initiator is not logged in at all, it will not appear
3. The port that initiator is logged into
4. The number of I/Os that came into that port from that initiator over the time period sampled
5. The relative percentage of I/Os for that initiator as compared to the maximum

©2020 Copyright Pure Storage. All rights reserved.

11
The balance command will count the I/Os that came down the particular initiator during the sampled time period, and it
will do that for all initiator/target relationships for that host. Whichever relationship/path has the most I/Os will be
designated as 100%. The rest of the paths will be then denoted as a percentage of that number. So if a host has two
paths, and the first path has 1,000 I/Os and the second path has 800, the first path will be 100% and the second will be
80%.

A well balanced host should be within a few percentage points of each path. Anything more than 15% or so might be
worthy of investigation. Refer to this post for more information.

The GUI will also report on host connectivity in general, based on initiator logins.

This report should be listed as redundant for every hosts, meaning that it is connected to each controller. If this reports
something else, investigate zoning and/or host configuration to correct this. For detailed explanation of the various
reported states, please refer to the FlashArray User Guide which can be found directly in your GUI:

©2020 Copyright Pure Storage. All rights reserved.

12
 Disk.MaxIOSize
The ESXi host setting, Disk.MaxIOSize, controls the largest I/O size that ESXi will allow to be sent from ESXi to an
underlying storage device. By default this is 32 MB. If an I/O is larger than the Disk.MaxIOSize value, ESXi will split the
I/O requests into segments under the configured limit.

This setting needs to be reduced in multiple situations:

1. If a virtual machine is using EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) instead of BIOS.

2. If your environment utilizes vSphere Replication.
3. If your environment contains VMs which house applications that are sending READ or WRITE requests larger than
4MB.

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13
In these situations it is necessary to reduce the ESXi parameter Disk.DiskMaxIOSize from the default of 32 MB (32,768
KB) down to 4 MB (4,096 KB) or less.

If this is not configured for ESXi hosts running EFI-enabled VMs, the virtual machine will fail to properly boot. If it is not
changed on hosts running VMs being replicated by vSphere Replication, replication will fail. If it is not changed for VMs
whose applications are sending requests larger than 4MB, the larger I/O requests will fail which results in the application
failing as well.

This should be set on every ESXi host in the cluster that VMs may have access to, in order to ensure vMotion is
successful from one ESXi host to another. If none of the above circumstances apply to your environment then this value
can remain at the default. There is no known performance effect to changing this value.

For more detail on this change, please refer to the VMware KB article here:

KB: Windows virtual machines using EFI fails to start

 BEST PRACTICE: Change the Disk.DiskMaxIOSize from 32 MB to at least 4 MB when any of the above
scenarios apply to your environment. A lower value is also acceptable.

VAAI Configuration
The VMware API for Array Integration (VAAI) primitives offer a way to offload and accelerate certain operations in a
VMware environment.

Pure Storage requires that all VAAI features be enabled on every ESXi hosts that are using FlashArray storage.
Disabling VAAI features can greatly reduce the efficiency and performance of FlashArray storage in ESXi environments.

All VAAI features are enabled by default (set to 1) in ESXi 5.x and later, so no action is typically required. Though these
settings can be verified via the vSphere Web Client or CLI tools.

1. WRITE SAME—DataMover.HardwareAcceleratedInit
2. XCOPY—DataMover.HardwareAcceleratedMove
3. ATOMIC TEST & SET— VMFSHardwareAcceleratedLocking

©2020 Copyright Pure Storage. All rights reserved.

14
  BEST PRACTICE: Keep VAAI enabled. DataMover.HardwareAcceleratedInit,
DataMover.HardwareAcceleratedMove, and VMFS3.HardwareAcceleratedLocking

In order to provide a more efficient heart-beating mechanism for datastores VMware introduced a new host-wide setting
called /VMFS3/UseATSForHBOnVMFS5. In VMware’s own words:

“A change in the VMFS heartbeat update method was introduced in ESXi 5.5 Update 2, to help optimize the VMFS
heartbeat process. Whereas the legacy method involves plain SCSI reads and writes with the VMware ESXi kernel
handling validation, the new method offloads the validation step to the storage system.“

Pure Storage recommends keeping this value on whenever possible. That being said, it is a host wide setting, and it can
possibly affect storage arrays from other vendors negatively. Read the VMware KB article here:

ESXi host loses connectivity to a VMFS3 and VMFS5 datastore

Pure Storage is NOT susceptible to this issue, but in the case of the presence of an affected array from another vendor,
it might be necessary to turn this off. In this case, Pure Storage supports disabling this value and reverting to traditional
heart-beating mechanisms.

 BEST PRACTICE: Keep VMFS3.UseATSForHBOnVMFS5 enabled—this is preferred. If another vendor is

present and prefers it to be disabled, it is supported by Pure Storage to disable it.

For additional information please refer to VMware Storage APIs for Array Integration with the Pure Storage
FlashArray document.

iSCSI Configuration
Just like any other array that supports iSCSI, Pure Storage recommends the following changes to an iSCSI-based
vSphere environment for the best performance.

©2020 Copyright Pure Storage. All rights reserved.

15
For a detailed walkthrough of setting up iSCSI on VMware ESXi and on the FlashArray please refer to the following
VMware white paper. This is required reading for any VMware/iSCSI user:

https://storagehub.vmware.com/t/vsphere-storage/best-practices-for-running-vmware-vsphere-on-iscsi/

Set Login Timeout to a Larger Value

For example, to set the Login Timeout value to 30 seconds, use commands similar to the following:

1. Log in to the vSphere Web Client and select the host under Hosts and Clusters.
2. Navigate to the Manage tab.
3. Select the Storage option.
4. Under Storage Adapters, select the iSCSI vmhba to be modified.
5. Select Advanced and change the Login Timeout parameter. This can be done on the iSCSI adapter itself or on a
specific target.

The default Login Timeout value is 5 seconds and the maximum value is 60 seconds.

 BEST PRACTICE: Set iSCSI Login Timeout for FlashArray targets to 30 seconds. A higher value is supported
but not necessary.

Disable DelayedAck
DelayedAck is an advanced iSCSI option that allows or disallows an iSCSI initiator to delay acknowledgement of
received data packets.

Disabling DelayedAck in ESXi 5.x:

1. Log in to the vSphere Web Client and select the host under Hosts and Clusters.
2. Navigate to the Manage tab.
3. Select the Storage option.
4. Under Storage Adapters, select the iSCSI vmhba to be modified.

Navigate to Advanced Options and modify the DelayedAck setting by using the option that best matches your
requirements, as follows:

Option 1: Modify the DelayedAck setting on a particular discovery address (recommended) as follows:

1. Select Targets.
2. On a discovery address, select the Dynamic Discovery tab.
3. Select the iSCSI server.
4. Click Advanced.
5. Change DelayedAck to false.

©2020 Copyright Pure Storage. All rights reserved.

16
Option 2: Modify the DelayedAck setting on a specific target as follows:

1. Select Targets.
2. Select the Static Discovery tab.
3. Select the iSCSI server and click Advanced.
4. Change DelayedAck to false.

Option 3: Modify the DelayedAck setting globally for the iSCSI adapter as follows:

1. Select the Advanced Options tab and click Advanced.

2. Change DelayedAck to false.

DelayedAck is highly recommended to be disabled, but is not absolutely required by Pure Storage. In highly-congested
networks, if packets are lost, or simply take too long to be acknowledged, due to that congestion, performance can drop.
If DelayedAck is enabled, where not every packet is acknowledged at once (instead one acknowledgement is sent per
so many packets) far more re-transmission can occur, further exacerbating congestion. This can lead to continually
decreasing performance until congestion clears. Since DelayedAck can contribute to this it is recommended to disable it
in order to greatly reduce the effect of congested networks and packet retransmission.

Enabling jumbo frames can further harm this since packets that are retransmitted are far larger. If jumbo frames are
enabled, it is absolutely recommended to disable DelayedAck. See the following VMware KB for more information:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/
search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1002598

 BEST PRACTICE: Disable DelayedAck for FlashArray iSCSI targets.

iSCSI Port Binding

For software iSCSI initiators, without additional configuration the default behavior for iSCSI pathing is for ESXi to
leverage its routing tables to identify a path to its configured iSCSI targets. Without solid understanding of network
configuration and routing behaviors, this can lead to unpredictable pathing and/or path unavailability in a hardware
failure. To configure predictable and reliable path selection and failover it is necessary to configure iSCSI port binding
(iSCSI multi-pathing).

Configuration and detailed discussion is out of the scope of this document, but it is recommended to read through the
following VMware document that describes this and other concepts in-depth:

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vmware-multipathing-configuration-software-iSCSI-port-
binding.pdf

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  BEST PRACTICE: Use Port Binding for ESXi software iSCSI adapters when possible.

Note that ESXi 6.5 has expanded support for port binding and features such as iSCSI routing (though the use of iSCSI
routing is not usually recommended) and multiple subnets. Refer to ESXi 6.5 release notes for more information.

Jumbo Frames
In some iSCSI environments it is required to enable jumbo frames to adhere with the network configuration between the
host and the FlashArray. Enabling jumbo frames is a cross-environment change so careful coordination is required to
ensure proper configuration. It is important to work with your networking team and Pure Storage representatives when
enabling jumbo frames. Please note that this is not a requirement for iSCSI use on the Pure Storage FlashArray—in
general Pure Storage recommends leaving MTU at the default setting.

That being said, altering the MTU is a fully supported and is up to the discretion of the user.

1. Configure jumbo frames on the FlashArray iSCSI ports

Configure jumbo frames on the physical network switch/infrastructure for each port using the relevant switch CLI or GUI.

2. Configure jumbo frames on the physical network switch/infrastructure for each port using the relevant switch CLI or
GUI.
1. Browse to a host in the vSphere Web Client navigator.
2. Click the Manage tab and select Networking > Virtual Switches.
3. Select the switch from the vSwitch list.
4. Click the name of the VMkernel network adapter.
5. Click the pencil icon to edit.
6. Click NIC settings and set the MTU to your desired value.
7. Click OK.
8. Click the pencil icon to edit on the top to edit the vSwitch itself.
9. Set the MTU to your desired value.
10. Click OK.

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Once jumbo frames are configured, verify end-to-end jumbo frame compatibility. To verify, try to ping an address on the
storage network with vmkping.

vmkping -d -s 8972 <ip address of Pure Storage iSCSI port>

If the ping operations does not return successfully, then jumbo frames is not properly configured in ESXi, the networking
devices, and/or the FlashArray port.

Challenge-Handshake Authentication Protocol (CHAP)

iSCSI CHAP is supported on the FlashArray for uni- or bidirectional authentication. Enabling CHAP is optional and up to
the discretion of the user. Please refer to the following post for a detailed walkthrough:

http://www.codyhosterman.com/2015/03/configuring-iscsi-chap-in-vmware-with-the-flasharray/

 Please note that iSCSI CHAP is not currently supported with dynamic iSCSI targets on the Fla shArray. If
CHAP is going to be used, please configure your iSCSI FlashArray targets as static targets.

Lowering iSCSI failover times

A common question encountered here at Pure Storage is why extended pauses in I/O are noted during specific
operations or tests when utilizing the iSCSI protocol. Often times the underlying reasons for these pauses in I/O are a
result of a network cable being disconnected, a misbehaving switch port, or a failover of the backend storage
array; though this list is certainly not exhaustive.

When the default configuration for iSCSI is in use with VMware ESXi the delay for these events will generally be 25-35
seconds. While the majority of environments are able to successfully recover from these events unscathed this is not
true for all environments. On a handful of occasions there have been environments which contain applications that need
faster recovery times. Without these faster recovery times I/O failures have been noted and manual recovery efforts
were required to bring the environment back online.

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While Pure Storage official best practice is to utilize default iSCSI configuration for failover times we also understand
that not all environments are created equal. As such we do support modifying the necessary iSCSI advanced
parameters to decrease failover times for sensitive applications.

Recovery times are controlled by the following 3 iSCSI advanced parameters:

Name Current Default Min Max Settable Inherit

-------------------- ---------- ---------- --- -------- -------- -------
NoopOutInterval 15 15 1 60 true false
NoopOutTimeout 10 10 10 30 true true
RecoveryTimeout 10 10 1 120 true true

To better understand how these parameters are used in iSCSI recovery efforts it is recommended you read the following
blog posts for deeper insight:

iSCSI: A 25 second pause in I/O during a single link loss? What gives?

iSCSI Advanced Settings

Once a thorough review of these iSCSI options have been investigated, additional testing within your own environment
is strongly recommended to ensure no additional issues are introduced as a result of these changes.

Datastore Management

Volume Sizing and Count

A common question when first provisioning storage on the FlashArray is what capacity should I be using for each
volume? VMware VMFS supports up to a maximum size of 64 TB. The FlashArray supports far larger than that, but for
ESXi, volumes should not be made larger than 64 TB due to the filesystem limit of VMFS.

Using a smaller number of large volumes is generally a better idea today. In the past a recommendation to use a larger
number of smaller volumes was made for performance limitations that no longer exist. This limit traditionally was due to
two reasons: VMFS scalability issues due to locking and/or per-volume queue limitations on the underlying array.
VMware resolved the first issue with the introduction of Atomic Test and Set, also called Hardware Assisted Locking.

Prior to the introduction of VAAI ATS (Atomic Test and Set), VMFS used LUN-level locking via full SCSI reservations to
acquire exclusive metadata control for a VMFS volume. In a cluster with multiple nodes, all metadata operations were
serialized and hosts had to wait until whichever host, currently holding a lock, released that lock. This behavior not only
caused metadata lock queues but also prevented standard I/O to a volume from VMs on other ESXi hosts which were
not currently holding the lock.

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With VAAI ATS, the lock granularity is reduced to a much smaller level of control (specific metadata segments, not an
entire volume) for the VMFS that a given host needs to access. This behavior makes the metadata change process not
only very efficient, but more importantly provides a mechanism for parallel metadata access while still maintaining data
integrity and availability. ATS allows for ESXi hosts to no longer have to queue metadata change requests, which
consequently speeds up operations that previously had to wait for a lock. Therefore, situations with large amounts of
simultaneous virtual machine provisioning operations will see the most benefit. The standard use cases benefiting the
most from ATS include:

• High virtual machine to VMFS density.

• Extremely dynamic environments—numerous provisioning and de-provisioning of VMs (e.g. VDI using non-
persistent linked-clones).
• High intensity virtual machine operations such as boot storms, or virtual disk growth.

The introduction of ATS removed scaling limits via the removal of lock contention; thus, moving the bottleneck down to
the storage, where many traditional arrays had per-volume I/O queue limits. This limited what a single volume could do
from a performance perspective as compared to what the array could do in aggregate. This is not the case with the
FlashArray.

A FlashArray volume is not limited by an artificial performance limit or an individual queue. A single FlashArray volume
can offer the full performance of an entire FlashArray, so provisioning ten volumes instead of one, is not going to empty
the HBAs out any faster. From a FlashArray perspective, there is no immediate performance benefit to using more than
one volume for your virtual machines.

The main point is that there is always a bottleneck somewhere, and when you fix that bottleneck, it is just transferred
somewhere else. ESXi was once the bottleneck due to its locking mechanism, then it fixed that with ATS. This, in turn,
moved the bottleneck down to the array volume queue depth limit. The FlashArray doesn’t have a volume queue depth
limit, so now that bottleneck has been moved back to ESXi and its internal queues.

Altering VMware queue limits is not generally needed with the exception of extraordinarily intense workloads. For high-
performance configuration, refer to the section of this document on ESXi queue configuration.

VMFS Version Recommendations

Pure Storage recommends using the latest supported version of VMFS that is permitted by your ESXi host.

For ESXi 5.x through 6.0, use VMFS-5. For ESXi 6.5 and later it is highly recommended to use VMFS-6. It should be
noted that VMFS-6 is not the default option for ESX 6.5, so be careful to choose the correct version when creating new
VMFS datastores in ESXi 6.5.

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Furthermore, when upgrading to ESXi 6.5, there is no in-place upgrade path of a VMFS-5 datastore to VMFS-6.
Therefore, it is recommended to create a new volume entirely, format it was VMFS-6, and then Storage vMotion all
virtual machines from the old VMFS-5 datastore to the new VMFS-6 datastore and then delete and remove the VMFS-5
datastore when complete.

 BEST PRACTICE: Use the latest supported VMFS version for the in-use ESXi host

Datastore Performance Management

ESXi and vCenter offer a variety of features to control the performance capabilities of a given datastore. This section will
overview FlashArray support and recommendations for these features.

For a deeper-dive of ESXi queueing and the FlashArray, please read this post:

http://www.codyhosterman.com/2017/02/understanding-vmware-esxi-queuing-and-the-flasharray/

Queue Depth Limits and DSNRO

ESXi offers the ability to configure queue depth limits for devices on a HBA or iSCSI initiator. This dictates how many I/
Os can be outstanding to a given device before I/Os start queuing in the ESXi kernel. If the queue depth limit is set too
low, IOPS and throughput can be limited and latency can increase due to queuing. If too high, virtual machine I/O
fairness can be affected and high-volume workloads can affect other workloads from other virtual machines or other
hosts. The device queue depth limit is set on the initiator and the value (and setting name) varies depending on the
model and type:

Type Default Value Value Name

QLogic 64 qlfxmaxqdepth

Brocade 32 bfa_lun_queue_depth

Emulex 32 lpfc0_lun_queue_depth

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 Type Default Value Value Name

Cisco UCS 32 fnic_max_qdepth

Software iSCSI 128 iscsivmk_LunQDepth

Changing these settings require a host reboot. For instructions to check and set these values, please refer to this
VMware KB article:

Changing the queue depth for QLogic, Emulex, and Brocade HBAs

There is a second per-device setting called “Disk Schedule Number Requests Outstanding” often referred to as
DSNRO. This is a hypervisor-level queue depth limit that provides a mechanism for managing the queue depth limit for
an individual device. This value is a per-device setting that defaults to 32 and can be increased to a value of 256.

It should be noted that this value only comes into play for a volume when that volume is being accessed by two or more
virtual machines on that host. If there is more than one virtual machine active on it, the lowest of the two values (DSNRO
or the HBA device queue depth limit) is the value that is observed by ESXi as the actual device queue depth limit. So, in
other words, if a volume has two VMs on it, and DSNRO is set to 32 and the HBA device queue depth limit is set to 64,
the actual queue depth limit for that device is 32. For more information on DSNRO see the VMware KB here:

Setting the Maximum Outstanding Disk Requests for virtual machines

In general, Pure Storage does not recommend changing these values. The majority of workloads are distributed across
hosts and/or not intense enough to overwhelm the default queue depths. The FlashArray is fast enough (low enough
latency) that the workload has to be quite high in order to overwhelm the queue.

If the default queue depth is consistently overwhelmed, the simplest option is to provision a new datastore and distribute
some virtual machines to the new datastore. If a workload from a virtual machine is too great for the default queue
depth, then increasing the queue depth limit is the better option.

If a workload demands queue depths to be increased, Pure Storage recommends making both the HBA device queue
depth limit and DSNRO equal. Generally, do not change these values without direction from VMware or Pure Storage
support.

You can verify the values of both of these for a given device with the command:

esxcli storage core device list –d <naa.xxxxx>

Device Max Queue Depth: 96

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 No of outstanding IOs with competing worlds: 64

 BEST PRACTICE: Leave queue depth limits at the default. Only raise them when performance requirements
dictate it.

Dynamic Queue Throttling

ESXi supports the ability to dynamically throttle a device queue depth limit when an array volume has been
overwhelmed. An array volume is overwhelmed when the array responds to an I/O request with a sense code of QUEUE
FULL or BUSY. When a certain number of these are received, ESXi will throttle down the queue depth limit for that
device and slowly increase it as conditions improve. This is controlled via two settings:

• Disk.QFullSampleSize—the count of QUEUE FULL or BUSY conditions it takes before ESXi will start throttling.
Default is zero (feature disabled)
• Disk.QFullThreshold—the count of good condition responses after a QUEUE FULL or BUSY required before ESXi
starts increasing the queue depth limit again

The Pure Storage FlashArray does not advertise a queue full condition for a volume. Since every volume can use the full
performance and queue of the FlashArray, this limit is impractically high and this sense code essentially will never be
issued. Therefore, there is no reason to set or alter these values for Pure Storage FlashArray volumes because QUEUE
FULL will never occur.

Storage I/O Control

VMware vCenter offers a feature called Storage I/O Control (SIOC) that will throttle selected virtual machines when a
certain average datastore latency has been reached or when a certain percentage of peak throughput has been hit.
ESXi throttles virtual machines by artificially reducing the number of slots that are available to it in the device queue
depth limit.
Pure Storage fully supports enabling this technology on datastores residing on the FlashArray. That being said, it may
not be particularly useful for a few reasons.
First, the minimum latency that can be configured for SIOC before it will begin throttling a virtual machine is 5 ms.

When a latency threshold is entered, vCenter will aggregate a weighted average of all disk latencies seen by all hosts
that see that particular datastore. This number does not include host-side queuing, it is only the time it takes for the I/O
to be sent from the SAN to the array and acknowledged back.

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Furthermore, SIOC uses a random-read injector to identify the capabilities of a datastore from a performance
perspective. At a high-level, it runs a quick series of tests with increasing numbers of outstanding I/Os to identify the
throughput maximums via high latency identification. This allows ESXi to determine what the peak throughput is, for
when the “Percentage of peak throughput” is chosen.

Knowing these factors, we can make these points about SIOC and the FlashArray:

1. SIOC is not going to be particularly helpful if there is host-side queueing since it does not take host-induced
additional latency into account. This (the ESXi device queue) is generally where most of the latency is introduced
in a FlashArray environment.
2. The FlashArray will rarely have sustained latency above 1 ms, so this threshold will not be reached for any
meaningful amount of time on a FlashArray volume so SIOC will never kick in
3. A single FlashArray volume does not have a queue limit, so it can handle quite a high number of outstanding I/O
and throughput (especially reads), therefore SIOC and its random-read injector cannot identify FlashArray limits in
meaningful ways.

In short, SIOC is fully supported by Pure Storage, but Pure Storage makes no specific recommendations for
configuration.

Storage DRS
VMware vCenter also offers a feature called Storage DRS (SDRS). SDRS moves virtual machines from one datastore to
another when a certain average latency threshold has been reach on the datastore or when a certain used capacity has
been reached. For this section, let’s focus on the performance-based moves.

Storage DRS, like Storage IO Control, wait for a certain latency threshold to be reached before it acts. And, also like
SIOC, the minimum is 5 ms.

While it is too high in general to be useful for FlashArray-induced latency, SDRS differs from SIOC in the latency it
actually looks at. SDRS uses the “VMObservedLatency” (referred to a GAVG in esxtop) averages from the hosts
accessing the datastore. Therefore, this latency includes time spent queueing in the ESXi kernel. So, theoretically, a
high-IOPS workload, with a low configured device queue depth limit, an I/O could conceivably spend 5 ms or more
queuing in the kernel. In this situation Storage DRS will suggest moving a virtual machine to a datastore which does not
have an overwhelmed queue.

That being said, this is still an unlikely scenario because:

1. The FlashArray empties out the queue fast enough that a workload must be quite intense to fill up an ESXi queue
so much that is spends 5 ms or more in it. Usually, with a workload like that, the queueing is higher up the stack (in
the virtual machine)
2. Storage DRS samples for 16 hours before it makes a recommendation, so typically you will get one
recommendation set per-day for a datastore. So this workload must be consistently and extremely high, for a long
time, before SDRS acts.

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In short, SDRS is fully supported by Pure Storage, but Pure Storage makes no specific recommendations for
performance-based move configuration.

Datastore Capacity Management

Managing the capacity usage of your VMFS datastores is an important part of regular care of your virtual infrastructure.
There are a variety of mechanisms inside of ESXi and vCenter to monitor capacity. Frequently, the concept of data
reduction on the FlashArray is seen as a complicating factor, when in reality it is a simplifying factor, or at worse, a non-
issue. Let’s overview some concepts on how to best manage VMFS datastores from a capacity perspective.

VMFS Usage vs. FlashArray Volume Capacity

VMFS reports how much is currently allocated in the filesystem on that volume. Depending on the type of virtual disk
(thin or thick), dictates how much is consumed upon creation of the virtual machine (or virtual disk specifically). Thin
disks only allocates what the guest has actually written to, and therefore VMFS only records what the virtual machine
has written in its space usage. Thick type virtual disks allocate the full virtual disk immediately, so VMFS records much
more space as being used than is actually used by the virtual machines.

This is one of the reasons thin virtual disks are preferred—you get better insight into how much space the guests are
actually using.

Regardless of what type you choose, ESXi is going to take the sum total of the allocated space of your virtual disks and
compare that to the total capacity of the filesystem of the volume. The used space is the sum of those virtual disks
allocations. This number increases as virtual disks grow or new ones are added, and can decrease as old ones are
deleted or moved, or even shrunk.

Compare this to what the FlashArray reports for a capacity. What the FlashArray reports for a volume usage is NOT the
amount used for that volume. What the FlashArray reports is the unique footprint of the volume on that array. Let’s look
at this VMFS that is on 512 GB FlashArray volume. The VMFS is therefore 512 GB, but is using 401 GB of space of the
filesystem. This means that there are 401 GB of allocated virtual disks:

Now let’s look at the FlashArray volume.

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The FlashArray volume shows that 80 GB is being used. Does this mean that VMFS is incorrect? No. VMFS is always
the source of truth. The “Volumes” metric represents the amount of physical capacity that has been written to the volume
after data reduction that no other volume on the array shares.

This metric can go change at any time as the data set changes on that volume or any other volume on the FlashArray.
If, for instance, some other host writes 2 GB to another volume (let’s call it “volume2”), and that 2 GB happens to be
identical to 2 GB of that 80 GB GB on “Vol04”, then “Vol04” would no longer have 80 GB of unique space. It would drop
down to 78 GB, even though nothing changed on “Vol04” itself. Instead, someone else just happened to write similar
data, making the footprint of “InfrastructureDS” less unique.

For a more detailed conversation around this, refer to this blog post:

http://www.codyhosterman.com/2017/01/vmfs-capacity-monitoring-in-a-data-reducing-world/

So, why doesn’t VMFS report the same used capacity as that the FlashArray reports for as used for the underlying
volume? Well, because they mean different things. VMware reports what is allocated on the VMFS and the FlashArray
reports what is unique on the underlying volume. The FlashArray value can change constantly. The FlashArray metric is
only meant to show how reducible the data on that volume is internal to the volume and against the entire array.
Conversely, VMFS capacity usage is based solely on how much capacity is allocated to it by virtual machines. The
FlashArray volume space metric, on the other hand, actually relates to what is also being used on other volumes. In
other words, VMFS usage is only affected by data on the VMFS volume itself. The FlashArray volume space metric is
affected by the data on the volume and also on all of volumes. So the two values should not be conflated.

For capacity tracking, you should refer to the VMFS usage. How do we best track VMFS usage? What do we do when it
is full?

Monitoring and Managing VMFS Capacity Usage

As virtual machines grow and as new ones are added, the VMFS volume they sit on will slowly fill up. How to respond
and to manage this is a common question.

In general, using a product like vRealize Operations Manager with the FlashArray Management Pack is a great option
here. But for the purposes of this document we will focus on what can be done inside of vCenter alone.

You need to decide on a few things:

• At what percentage full of my VMFS volume do I become concerned?

• When that happens what should I do?
• What capacity value should I monitor on the FlashArray?

The first question is the easiest to answer. Choose either a percentage full, or at a certain capacity free. Do you want to
do something when, for example, a VMFS volume hits 75% full or when there is less than 50 GB left free? Choose what
makes sense to you.

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vCenter alerts are a great way to monitor VMFS capacity automatically. There is a default alert for datastore capacity,
but it does not do anything other than tag the datastore object with the alarm state. Pure Storage recommends creating
an additional alarm for capacity that executes some type of additional action when the alarm is triggered.

Configuring a script to run, an email to be issued, or a notification trap to be sent greatly diminishes the chance of a
datastore running out of space unnoticed.

 BEST PRACTICE: Configure capacity alerts to send a message or initiate an action

The next step is to decide what happens when a capacity warning occurs. There are a few options:

1. Increase the capacity of the volume

2. Move virtual machines off of the volume
3. Add a new volume

Your solution may be one of these options or a mix of all three. Let’s quickly walk through the options.

Option 1: Increase the capacity of the volume

This is the simplest option. If capacity has crossed the threshold you have specified, increase the volume apacity to
clear the threshold. The process is:

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Increase the FlashArray volume capacity:

Rescan the hosts that use the datastore:

Increase the VMFS to use the new capacity:

Choose “Use ‘Free space xxx TB’ to expand the datastore”. There should be a note that the datastore already occupies
space on this volume. If this note does not appear, you have selected the wrong device to expand to. Pure Storage
highly recommends that you do not create VMFS datastores that span multiple volumes—a VMFS should have a one to
one relationship to a FlashArray volume.

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29
This will clear the alarm and add additional capacity.

Option 2: Move virtual machine off of the volume

Another option is to move one or more virtual machines from a more-full datastore to a less-full datastore. While this can
be manually achieved through case-by-case Storage vMotion, Pure Storage recommends leveraging Storage DRS to
automate this. Storage DRS provides, in addition to the performance-based moves discussed earlier in this document,
the ability to automatically Storage vMotion virtual machines based on capacity usage of VMFS datastores. If a
datastore reaches a certain percent full, SDRS can automatically move, or make recommendations for, virtual machines
to be moved to balance out space usage across volumes.

SDRS is enabled on a datastore cluster:

When a datastore cluster is created you can enable SDRS and choose capacity threshold settings, which can either be
a percentage or a capacity amount:

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30
Pure Storage has no specific recommendations for these values and can be decided upon based on your own
environment. Pure Storage does have a few recommendations for datastore cluster configuration in general:

• Only include datastores on the same FlashArray in a given datastore cluster. This will allow Storage vMotion to use
the VAAI XCOPY offload to accelerate the migration process of virtual machines and greatly reduce the footprint of
the migration workload
• Include datastores with similar configurations in a datastore cluster. For example, if a datastore is replicated on the
FlashArray, only include datastores that are replicated in the same FlashArray protection group so that a SDRS
migration does not violate required protection for a virtual machine

Option 3: Create a new VMFS volume

The last option is to create an entirely new VMFS volume. You might decide to do this for a few reasons:

1. The current VMFS volumes have maxed out possible capacity (64 TB each)
2. The current VMFS volumes have overloaded the queue depth inside of every ESXi server using it. Therefore, they
can be grown in capacity, but cannot provide any more performance due to ESXi limits

In this situation follow the standard VMFS provisioning steps for a new datastore. Once the creation of volumes and
hosts/host groups and the volume connection is complete, the volumes will be accessible to the ESXi host(s)
[Presuming SAN zoning is completed]. Using the vSphere Web Client, initiate a “Rescan Storage…” to make the newly-
connected Pure Storage volume(s) fully-visible to the ESXi servers in the cluster as shown above. One can then use the
“Add Storage” wizard to format the newly added volume.

Shrinking a Volume
While it is possible to shrink a FlashArray volume non-disruptively, vSphere does not have the ability to shrink a VMFS
partition. Therefore, do not shrink FlashArray volumes that contain VMFS datastores as doing so could incur data
loss.

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 Mounting a Snapshot Volume
The Pure Storage FlashArray provides the ability to take local or remote point-in-time snapshots of volumes which can
then be used for backup/restore and/or test/dev. When a snapshot is taken of a volume containing a VMFS, there are a
few additional steps from both the FlashArray and vSphere sides to be able to access the snapshot point-in-time data.

When a FlashArray snapshot is taken, a new volume is not created—essentially it is a metadata point-in-time reference
to a data blocks on the array that reflect that moment’s version of the data. This snapshot is immutable and cannot be
directly mounted. Instead, the metadata of a snapshot has to be “copied” to an actual volume which then allows the
point-in-time, which was preserved by the snapshot metadata, to be presented to a host. This behavior allows the
snapshot to be re-used again and again without changing the data in that snapshot. If a snapshot is not needed more
than one time an alternative option is to create a direct snap copy from one volume to another—merging the snapshot
creation step with the association step.

When a volume hosting a VMFS datastore is copied via array-based snapshots, the copied VMFS datastore is now on a
volume that has a different serial number than the original source volume. Therefore, the VMFS will be reported as
having an invalid signature since the VMFS datastore signature is a hash partially based on the serial of the hosting
device. Consequently, the device will not be automatically mounted upon rescan—instead the new datastore wizard
needs to be run to find the device and resignature the VMFS datastore. Pure Storage recommends resignaturing copied
volumes rather than mounting them with an existing signatures (referred to as force mounting).

 BEST PRACTICEResignature copied VMFS volumes and do not force mount them

For more detail on resignaturing and snapshot management, please refer to the following blog posts:

• Mounting an unresolved VMFS

• Why not force mount?

• Why might a VMFS resignature operation fail?

• How to correlate a VMFS and a FlashArray volume

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 • How to snapshot a VMFS on the FlashArray

• Restoring a single VM from a FlashArray snapshot

Deleting a Datastore
Prior to the deletion of a volume, ensure that all important data has been moved off or is no longer needed. From the
vSphere Web Client (or CLI) delete or unmount the VMFS volume and then detach the underlying device from the
appropriate host(s).

After a volume has been detached from the ESXi host(s) it must first be disconnected (from the FlashArray perspective)
from the host within the Purity GUI before it can be destroyed (deleted) on the FlashArray.

 BEST PRACTICE: Unmount and detach FlashArray volumes from all ESXi hosts before destroying them on
the array

1. Unmount the VMFS datastore on every host that it is mounted to.

2. Detach the volume that hosted the datastore from every ESXi host that sees the volume

3. Disconnect the volume from the hosts or host groups on the FlashArray

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Destroy the volume on FlashArray. It is not recommended to eradicate it. Let the FlashArray eradicate it automatically in
24 to provide for recovery if needed.

By default a volume can be recovered after deletion for 24 hours to protect against accidental removal.

This entire removal and deletion process is automated through the Pure Storage Plugin for the vSphere Web Client and
its use is therefore recommended.

Virtual Machine and Guest Configuration

This section reviews recommended settings and configurations for virtual machines and their guest operating systems.
In general, refer to VMware recommendations for configuration of virtual guests, but Pure Storage does have some
additional recommendations for certain situations.

As always, configure guest operating systems in accordance with the corresponding vendor installation guidelines.

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 Virtual Disk Choice
Storage provisioning in virtual infrastructure involves multiple steps of crucial decisions. VMware vSphere offers three
virtual disks formats: thin, zeroedthick and eagerzeroedthick.

To quickly review the types:

1. Thin—thin virtual disks only allocate what is used by the guest. Upon creation, thin virtual disks only consume one
block of space. As the guest writes data, new blocks are allocated on VMFS, then zereod out, then the data is
committed to storage. Therefore there is some additional latency for new write
2. Zeroedthick (lazy)— zeroed thick virtual disks allocate all of the space on the VMFS upon creation. As soon as the
guest writes to a specific block for the first time in the virtual disk, the block is first zeroed, then the data is
committed. Therefore there is some additional latency for new writes. Though less than thin (since it only has to
zero—not also allocate), there is a negligible performance impact between zeroedthick (lazy) and thin.
3. Eagerzeroedthick—eagerzeroedthick virtual disks allocate all of their provisioned size upon creation and also zero
out the entire capacity upon creation. This type of disk cannot be used until the zeroing is complete.
Eagerzeroedthick has zero first-write latency penalty because allocation and zeroing is done in advance, and not
on-demand.

Prior to WRITE SAME support, the performance differences between these virtual disk allocation mechanisms were
distinct. This was due to the fact that before an unallocated block could be written to, zeroes would have to be written
first causing an allocate-on-first-write penalty (increased latency). Therefore, for every new block written, there were
actually two writes; the zeroes then the actual data. For thin and zeroedthick virtual disks, this zeroing was on-demand
so the penalty was seen by applications. For eagerzeroedthick, it was noticed during deployment because the entire
virtual disk had to be zeroed prior to use. This zeroing caused unnecessary I/O on the SAN fabric, subtracting available
bandwidth from “real” I/O.

To resolve this issue, VMware introduced WRITE SAME support. WRITE SAME is a SCSI command that tells a target
device (or array) to write a pattern (in this case, zeros) to a target location. ESXi utilizes this command to avoid having to
actually send a payload of zeros but instead simply communicates to any array that it needs to write zeros to a certain
location on a certain device. This not only reduces traffic on the SAN fabric, but also speeds up the overall process since
the zeros do not have to traverse the data path.

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35
This process is optimized even further on the Pure Storage FlashArray. Since the array does not store space-wasting
patterns like contiguous zeros on the array, the zeros are discarded and any subsequent reads will result in the array
returning zeros to the host. This additional array-side optimization further reduces the time and penalty caused by pre-
zeroing of newly-allocated blocks.

With this knowledge, choosing a virtual disk is a factor of a few different variables that need to be evaluated. In general,
Pure Storage makes the following recommendations:

• Lead with thin virtual disks. They offer the greatest flexibility and functionality and the performance difference is only
at issue with the most sensitive of applications.
• For highly-sensitive applications with high performance requirements, eagerzeroedthick is the best choice. It is
always the best-performing virtual disk type.
• In no situation does Pure Storage recommend the use of zeroedthick (thick provision lazy zeroed) virtual disks.
There is very little advantage to this format over the others and can also lead to stranded space as described in this
post.

With that being said, for more details on how these recommendations were decided upon, refer to the following
considerations. Note that at the end of each consideration is a recommendation but that recommendation is valid only
when only that specific consideration is important. When choosing a virtual disk type, take into account your virtual
machine business requirements and utilize these requirements to motivate your design decisions. Based on those
decisions, choose the virtual disk type that is best suitable for your virtual machine.

• Performance—with the introduction of WRITE SAME (more information on WRITE SAME can be found in the
section Block Zero or WRITE SAME) support, the performance difference between the different types of virtual
disks is dramatically reduced—almost eliminated. In lab experiments, a difference can be observed during writes to
unallocated portions of a thin or zeroedthick virtual disk. This difference is negligible but of course still non-zero.
Therefore, performance is no longer an overridingly important factor in the type of virtual disk to use as the disparity
is diminished, but for the most latency-sensitive of applications eagerzeroedthick will always be slightly better than
the others. Recommendation: eagerzeroedthick.
• Protection against space exhaustion—each virtual disk type, based on its architecture, has varying degrees of
protection against space exhaustion. Thin virtual disks do not reserve space on the VMFS datastore upon creation
and instead grow in 1 MB blocks as needed. Therefore, if unmonitored, as one or more thin virtual disks grow on
the datastore, they could exhaust the capacity of the VMFS. Even if the underlying array has plenty of additional
capacity to provide. If careful monitoring is in place that provides the ability to make proactive resolution of capacity
exhaustion (moving the virtual machines around or grow the VMFS) thin virtual disks are a perfectly acceptable
choice. Storage DRS is an excellent solution for space exhaustion prevention. While careful monitoring can protect
against this possibility, it can still be of a concern and should be contemplated upon initial provisioning. Zeroedthick
and eagerzeroedthick virtual disks are not susceptible to VMFS logical capacity exhaustion because the space is
reserved on the VMFS upon creation. Recommendation: eagerzeroedthick.
• Virtual disk density—it should be noted that while all virtual disk types take up the same amount of physical space
on the FlashArray due to data reduction, they have different requirements on the VMFS layer. Thin virtual disks can
be oversubscribed (more capacity provisioned than the VMFS reports as being available) allowing for far more
virtual disks to fit on a given volume than either of the thick formats. This provides a greater virtual machine to
VMFS datastore density and reduces the number or size of volumes that are required to store them. This, in effect,
reduces the management overhead of provisioning and managing additional volumes in a VMware environment.
Recommendation: thin.
• Time to create—the virtual disk types also vary in how long it takes to initially create them. Since thin and
zeroedthick virtual disks do not zero space until they are actually written to by a guest they are both created in trivial
amounts of time—usually a second or two. Eagerzeroedthick disks, on the other hand, are pre-zeroed at creation

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36
 and consequently take additional time to create. If the time-to-first-IO is paramount for whatever reason, thin or
zeroedthick is best. Recommendation: thin.
• Space efficiency—the aforementioned bullet on “virtual disk density” describes efficiency on the VMFS layer.
Efficiency on the underlying array should also be considered. In vSphere 6.0, thin virtual disks support guest-OS
initiated UNMAP to a virtual disk, through the VMFS and down to the physical storage. Therefore, thin virtual disks
can be more space efficient as time wears on and data is written and deleted. For more information on this
functionality in vSphere 6.0, refer to the section, In-Guest UNMAP in ESXi 6.x, that can be found later in this paper.
Recommendation: thin.
• Storage usage trending—A useful metric to know and track is how much capacity is actually being used by a
virtual machine guest. If you know how much space is being used by the guests, and furthermore, at what rate that
is growing, you can more appropriately size and project storage allocations. Since thick type virtual disks reserve all
of the space on the VMFS whether or not the guest has used it, it is difficult to know, without guest tools, how much
the guest has actually written. Often it is not known until the application has used its available space and the
administrator requests more. This leads to abrupt and unplanned capacity increases. Thin virtual disks only reserve
what the guest has written, therefore will grow as the guest adds more data. This growth can be monitored and
trended. This will allow VMware administrators to plan and predict future storage needs. Recommendation: thin.

 BEST PRACTICE: Use thin virtual disks for most virtual machines. Use eagerzeroedthick for virtual machines
that require very high performance levels.

Do not use zeroedthick.

No virtual disk option quite fits all possible use-cases perfectly, so choosing an allocation method should generally be
decided upon on a case-by-case basis. VMs that are intended for short term use, without extraordinarily high
performance requirements, fit nicely with thin virtual disks. For VMs that have higher performance needs
eagerzeroedthick is a good choice.

Virtual Hardware Configuration

Pure Storage makes the following recommendations for configuring a virtual machine in vSphere:

Virtual SCSI Adapter—the best performing and most efficient virtual SCSI adapter is the VMware Paravirtual SCSI
Adapter. This adapter has the best CPU efficiency at high workloads and provides the highest queue depths for a virtual
machine—starting at an adapter queue depth of 256 and a virtual disk queue depth 64 (twice what the LSI Logic can
provide by default). The queue limits of PVSCSI can be further tuned, please refer to the Guest-level Settings section for
more information.

Virtual Hardware—it is recommended to use the latest virtual hardware version that the hosting ESXi hosts supports.

VMware tools—in general, it is advisable to install the latest supported version of VMware tools in all virtual machines.

CPU and Memory - provision vCPUs and memory as per the application requirements.

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37
VM encryption—vSphere 6.5 introduced virtual machine encryption which encrypts the VM’s virtual disk from a VMFS
perspective. Pure Storage generally recommends not using this and instead relying on FlashArray-level Data-At-Rest-
Encryption. Though, if it is necessary to leverage VM Encryption, doing so is fully supported by Pure Storage—but it
should be noted that data reduction will disappear for that virtual machine as host level encryption renders post-
encryption deduplication and compression impossible.

IOPS Limits—if you want to limit a virtual machine or a particular amount of IOPS, you can use the built-in ESXi IOPS
limits. ESXi allows you to specify a number of IOPS a given virtual machine can issue for a given virtual disk. Once the
virtual machine exceeds that number, any additional I/Os will be queued. In ESXi 6.0 and earlier this can be applied via
the “Edit Settings” option of a virtual machine. In ESXi 6.5 and later, this can also be configured via a VM Storage Policy.

 BEST PRACTICE: Use the Paravirtual SCSI

adapter for virtual machines for best
performance.

Template Configuration
In general, template configuration is no different than
virtual machine configuration. Standard recommendations
apply. That being said, since templates are by definition frequently copied, Pure Storage recommends putting copies of
the templates on FlashArrays that are frequent targets of virtual machines deployed from a template. If the template and
target datastore are on the same FlashArray, the copy process can take advantage of VAAI XCOPY, which greatly
accelerates the copy process while reducing the workload impact of the copy operation.

 BEST PRACTICE: For the fastest and most efficient virtual machine deployments, place templates on the
same FlashArray as the target datastore.

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Prior to Full Copy (XCOPY) API support, when virtual machines needed to be copied or moved from one location to
another, such as with Storage vMotion or a virtual machine cloning operation, ESXi would issue many SCSI read/write
commands between the source and target storage location (the same or different device). This resulted in a very intense
and often lengthy additional workload to this set of devices. This SCSI I/O consequently stole available bandwidth from
more “important” I/O such as the I/O issued from virtualized applications. Therefore, copy or move operations often had
to be scheduled to occur only during non-peak hours in order to limit interference with normal production storage
performance. This restriction effectively decreased the ability of administrators to use the virtualized infrastructure in the
dynamic and flexible nature that was intended.

The introduction of XCOPY support for virtual machine movement allows for this workload to be offloaded from the
virtualization stack to almost entirely onto the storage array. The ESXi kernel is no longer directly in the data copy path
and the storage array instead does all the work. XCOPY functions by having the ESXi host identify a region of a VMFS
that needs to be copied. ESXi describes this space into a series of XCOPY SCSI commands and sends them to the
array. The array then translates these block descriptors and copies/moves the data from the described source locations
to the described target locations. This architecture therefore does not require the moved data to be sent back and forth
between the host and array—the SAN fabric does not play a role in traversing the data. This vastly reduces the time to
move data. XCOPY benefits are leveraged during the following operations[1]:

• Virtual machine cloning

• Storage vMotion
• Deploying virtual machines from template

During these offloaded operations, the throughput required on the data path is greatly reduced as well as the ESXi
hardware resources (HBAs, CPUs etc.) initiating the request. This frees up resources for more important virtual machine
operations by letting the ESXi resources do what they do best: run virtual machines, and lets the storage do what it does
best: manage the storage.

On the Pure Storage FlashArray, XCOPY sessions are exceptionally quick and efficient. Due to FlashReduce
technology (features like deduplication, pattern removal and compression) similar data is never stored on the FlashArray
more than once. Therefore, during a host-initiated copy operation such as with XCOPY, the FlashArray does not need to
copy the data—this would be wasteful. Instead, Purity simply accepts and acknowledges the XCOPY requests and
creates new (or in the case of Storage vMotion, redirects existing) metadata pointers. By not actually having to copy/
move data, the offload duration is greatly reduced. In effect, the XCOPY process is a 100% inline deduplicated
operation. A non-VAAI copy process for a virtual machine containing 50 GB of data can take on the order of multiple
minutes or more depending on the workload on the SAN. When XCOPY is enabled this time drops to a matter of a few
seconds.

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XCOPY on the Pure Storage FlashArray works directly out of the box without any configuration required. Nevertheless,
there is one simple configuration change on the ESXi hosts that will increase the speed of XCOPY operations. ESXi
offers an advanced setting called the MaxHWTransferSize that controls the maximum amount of data space that a
single XCOPY SCSI command can describe. The default value for this setting is 4 MB. This means that any given
XCOPY SCSI command sent from that ESXi host cannot exceed 4 MB of described data. Pure Storage recommends
leaving this at the default value, but does support increasing the value if another vendor requires it to be. There is no
XCOPY performance impact of increasing this value. Decreasing the value from 4 MB can slow down XCOPY sessions
somewhat and should not be done without guidance from VMware or Pure Storage support.

Guest-level Settings
In general, standard operating system configuration best practices apply and Pure Storage does not make any
overriding recommendations. So, please refer to VMware and/or OS vendor documentation for particulars of configuring
a guest operating system for best operation in VMware virtualized environment.

That being said, Pure Storage does recommend two non-default options for file system configuration in a guest on a
virtual disk residing on a FlashArray volume. Both configurations provide automatic space reclamation support. While it
is highly recommended to follow these recommendations, it is not absolutely required.

In short:

• For Linux guests in vSphere 6.5 or later using thin virtual disks, mount filesystems with the discard option
• For Windows 2012 R2 or later guests in vSphere 6.0 or later using thin virtual disks, use a NTFS allocation unit
size of 64K

Refer to the in-guest space reclamation section for a detailed description of enabling these options.

[1
• ] Note that there are VMware-enforced caveats in certain situations that would prevent XCOPY behavior and
revert to legacy software copy. Refer to VMware documentation for this information at www.vmware.com.

High-IOPS Virtual Machines

As mentioned earlier, the Paravirtual SCSI adapter should be leveraged for the best default performance. For virtual
machines that host applications that need to push a large amount of IOPS (50,000+) to a single virtual disk, some non-
default configurations are required. The PVSCSI adapter allows the default adapter queue depth limit and the per-device
queue depth limit to be increased from the default of 256 and 64 (respectively) to 1024 and 256.

In general, this change is not needed and therefore not recommended for most workloads. Only increase these values if
you know a virtual machine needs or will need this additional queue depth. Opening this queue for a virtual machine that
does not (or should not) need it, can expose noisy neighbor performance issues. If a virtual machine has a process that
unexpectedly becomes intense it can unfairly steal queue slots from other virtual machines sharing the underlying
datastore on that host. This can then cause the performance of other virtual machines to suffer.

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40
  BEST PRACTICE: Leave virtual machine queue depth limits at the default unless performance requirements
dictate otherwise.

If an application does need to push a high amount of IOPS to a single virtual disk these limits must be increased. See
VMware KB here for information on how to configure Paravirtual SCSI adapter queue limits. The process slightly differs
between Linux and Windows.

Refer to this blog post for more information:

http://www.codyhosterman.com/2017/02/understanding-vmware-esxi-queuing-and-the-flasharray/

A few general recommendations:

1. Only increase these limits when needed

2. If you change this limit it is required to change queue depth limits in ESXi as well, otherwise changing these values
will have no tangible affect
3. A good rule of knowing if you need to change these values is if you are not getting the IOPS you expect and the
latency is high in the guest, but not reported as high in ESXi or on the FlashArray volume

Space Management and Reclamation

In block-based storage implementations, the file system is managed by the host, not the array. Because of this, the
array does not typically know when a file has been deleted or moved from a storage volume and therefore does not
know when to release the space. This behavior is especially detrimental in thinly-provisioned environments (which today
is nearly ubiquitous) where that space could be immediately allocated to another device/application or just returned to
the pool of available storage. Space consumed by files that have been deleted or moved is referred to as “dead space”.

For data reduction all-flash-arrays like the FlashArray, it is of particular importance to make sure that this dead space is
reclaimed. If dead space is not reclaimed the array can inaccurately report how much space is being used, which can
lead to confusion (due to differing used space reporting from the hosts) and premature purchase of additional storage.
Therefore, reclaiming this space and making sure the FlashArray has an accurate reflection of what is actually used is
essential. An accurate space report has the following benefits:

• More efficient replication since blocks that are no longer needed are not replication
• More efficient snapshots, blocks that are no longer needed are not protected by additional snapshots
• Better space usage trending, if space is updated to be accurate frequently it is much easier to trend and project
actual space exhaustion. Otherwise, dead space can make it seem that capacity is used up far earlier than it should
be

The feature that can be used to reclaim space is called Space Reclamation, which uses the SCSI command called
UNMAP. UNMAP can be issued to underlying device to inform the array that certain blocks are no longer needed by the
host and can be “reclaimed”. The array can then return those blocks to the pool of free storage.

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Ensuring that space is reclaimed on a regular basis is a primary best practice for using the FlashArray in VMware
environments. Read on for details.

VMware Dead Space Overview

There are two place that dead space can be introduced:

• VMFS—when an administrator deletes a virtual disk or an entire virtual machine (or moves it to another datastore)
the space that used to store that virtual disk or virtual machine is now dead on the array. The array does not know
that the space has been freed up, therefore, effectively turning those blocks into dead space.
• In-guest—when a file has been moved or deleted from a guest filesystem inside of a virtual machine on a virtual
disk, the underlying VMFS does not know that a block is no longer in use by the virtual disk and consequently
neither does the array. So that space is now also dead space.

So dead space can be accumulated in two ways. Fortunately, VMware has methods for dealing with both, that leverage
the UNMAP feature support of the FlashArray.

Space Reclamation with VMFS

Space reclamation with VMFS differs depending on the version of ESXi. VMware has supported UNMAP in various
forms since ESXi 5.0. This document is only going to focus on UNMAP implementation for ESXi 5.5 and later. For
previous UNMAP behaviors, refer to VMware documentation.

In vSphere 5.5 and 6.0, VMFS UNMAP is a manual process, executed on demand by an administrator. In vSphere 6.5,
VMFS UNMAP is an automatic process that gets executed by ESXi as needed without administrative intervention.

VMFS UNMAP in vSphere 5.5 through 6.0

To reclaim space in vSphere 5.5 and 6.0, UNMAP is available in the command “esxcli”. UNMAP can be run anywhere
esxcli is installed and therefore does not require an SSH session:

esxcli storage vmfs unmap -l <datastore name> -n (blocks per iteration)

UNMAP with esxcli is an iterative process. The block count specifies how large each iteration is. If you do not specify a
block count, 200 blocks will be the default value (each block is 1 MB, so each iteration issues UNMAP to a 200 MB
section at a time). The operation runs UNMAP against the free space of the VMFS volume until the entirety of the free
space has been reclaimed. If the free space is not perfectly divisible by the block count, the block count will be reduced
at the final iteration to whatever amount of space is left.

While the FlashArray can handle very large values for this, ESXi does not support increasing the block count any larger
than 1% of the free capacity of the target VMFS volume. Consequently, the best practice for block count during UNMAP
is no greater than 1% of the free space. So as an example, if a VMFS volume has 1,048,576 MB free, the largest block
count supported is 10,485 (always round down). If you specify a larger value the command will still be accepted, but
ESXi will override the value back down to the default of 200 MB, which will dramatically slow down the operation.

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It is imperative to calculate the block count value based off of the 1% of the free space only when that capacity is
expressed in megabytes—since VMFS 5 blocks are 1 MB each. This will allow for simple and accurate identification of
the largest allowable block count for a given datastore. Using GB or TB can lead to rounding errors, and as a result, too
large of a block count value. Always round off decimals to the lowest near MB in order to calculate this number (do not
round up).

 BEST PRACTICE: For shortest UNMAP duration, use a large block count.

There are other methods to run or even schedule UNMAP, such as PowerCLI, vRealize Orchestrator and the FlashArray
vSphere Web Client Plugin. These methods are outside of the scope of this document, please refer to the respective
VMware and FlashArray integration documents for further detail.

If an UNMAP process seems to be slow, you can check to see if the block count value was overridden. You can check
the hostd.log file in the /var/log/ directory on the target ESXi host. For every UNMAP operation there will be a series of
messages that dictate the block count for every iteration. Examine the log and look for a line that indicates the UUID of
the VMFS volume being reclaimed, the line will look like the example below:

Unmap: Async Unmapped 5000 blocks from volume 545d6633-4e026dce-d8b2-90e2ba392174

 From ESXi 5.5 Patch 3 and later, any UNMAP operation against a datastore that is 75% or more full will use a
block count of 200 regardless to any block count specified in the command. For more information refer to the
VMware KB article here.

VMFS UNMAP in vSphere 6.5

In the ESXi 6.5 release, VMware introduced automatic UNMAP support for VMFS volumes. ESXi 6.5 introduced a new
version of VMFS, version 6. With VMFS-6, there is a new setting for all VMFS-6 volumes called UNMAP priority. This
defaults to low.

Pure Storage recommends that this be configured to “low” and not disabled. For the initial release of ESXi 6.5, VMware
currently only offers a low priority—medium and high priorities have not yet been enabled in the ESXi kernel. Pure
Storage will re-evaluate this recommendation when and if these higher priorities become available.

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43
Automatic UNMAP with vSphere 6.5 is an asynchronous task and reclamation will not occur immediately and will
typically take 12 to 24 hours to complete. Each ESXi 6.5 host has a UNMAP “crawler” that will work in tandem to reclaim
space on all VMFS-6 volumes they have access to. If, for some reason, the space needs to be reclaimed immediately,
the esxcli UNMAP operation described in the previous section can be run.

 BEST PRACTICE: Use VMFS-6 if running ESXi 6.5 and higher

BEST PRACTICE: Keep automatic UNMAP enabled on VMFS-6 volumes with the setting of “low”

Please note that VMFS-6 Automatic UNMAP will not be issued to inactive datastores. In other words, if a datastore does
not have actively running virtual machines on it, the datastore will be ignored. In those cases, the simplest option to
reclaim them is to run the traditional esxcli UNMAP command.

Pure Storage does support automatic UNMAP being disabled, if that is, for some reason, preferred by the customer. But
to provide the most efficient and accurate environment, it is highly recommended to be left enabled.

Space Reclamation In-Guest

The discussion above speaks only about space reclamation directly on a VMFS volume which pertains to dead space
accumulated by the deletion or migration of virtual machines and virtual disks. Running UNMAP on a VMFS only
removes dead space in that scenario. But, as mentioned earlier, dead space can accumulate higher up in the VMware
stack—inside of the virtual machine itself.

When a guest writes data to a file system on a virtual disk, the required capacity is allocated on the VMFS (if not already
allocated) by expanding the file that represents the virtual disk. The data is then committed down to the array. When that
data is deleted by the guest, the guest OS filesystem is cleared of the file, but this deletion is not reflected by the virtual
disk allocation on the VMFS, nor the physical capacity on the array. To ensure the below layers are accurately reporting
used space, in-guest UNMAP should be enabled.

Understanding In-Guest UNMAP in ESXi

Prior to ESXi 6.0 and virtual machine hardware version 11, guests could not leverage native UNMAP capabilities on a
virtual disk because ESXi virtualized the SCSI layer and did not report UNMAP capability up through to the guest. So
even if guest operating systems supported UNMAP natively, they could not issue UNMAP to a file system residing on a
virtual disk. Consequently, reclaiming this space was a manual and tedious process.

In ESXi 6.0, VMware has resolved this problem and streamlined the reclamation process. With in-guest UNMAP
support, guests running in a virtual machine using hardware version 11 can now issue UNMAP directly to virtual disks.
The process is as follows:

1. A guest application or user deletes a file from a file system residing on a thin virtual disk
2. The guest automatically (or manually) issues UNMAP to the guest file system on the virtual disk
3. The virtual disk is then shrunk in accordance to the amount of space reclaimed inside of it.
4. If EnableBlockDelete is enabled, UNMAP will then be issued to the VMFS volume for the space that previously

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44
 was held by the thin virtual disk. The capacity is then reclaimed on the FlashArray.

Prior to ESXi 6.0, the parameter EnableBlockDelete was a defunct option that was previously only functional in very
early versions of ESXi 5.0 to enable or disable automated VMFS UNMAP. This option is now functional in ESXi 6.0 and
has been re-purposed to allow in-guest UNMAP to be translated down to the VMFS and accordingly the SCSI volume.
By default, EnableBlockDelete is disabled and can be enabled via the vSphere Web Client or CLI utilities.

In-guest UNMAP support does actually not require this parameter to be enabled though. Enabling this parameter allows
for end-to-end UNMAP or in other words, in-guest UNMAP commands to be passed down to the VMFS layer. For this
reason, enabling this option is a best practice for ESXi 6.x and later.

 Enable the option “VMFS3.EnableBlockDelete” on ESXi 6.x hosts. This is disabled by default.

For more information on EnableBlockDelete and VMFS-6, refer to this blog post:

https://www.codyhosterman.com/2017/08/in-guest-unmap-enableblockdelete-and-vmfs-6/

ESXi 6.5 expands support for in-guest UNMAP to additional guests types. ESXi 6.0 in-guest UNMAP only is supported
with Windows Server 2012 R2 (or Windows 8) and later. ESXi 6.5 introduces support for Linux operating systems. The
underlying reason for this is that ESXi 6.0 and earlier only supported SCSI version 2. Windows uses SCSI-2 UNMAP
and therefore could take advantage of this feature set. Linux, uses SCSI version 5 and could not. In ESXi 6.5, VMware
enhanced their SCSI support to go up to SCSI-6, which allows guest like Linux to issue commands that they could not
before.

Using the built-in Linux tool, sq_inq, you can see, through an excerpt of the response, the SCSI support difference
between the ESXi versions:

You can note the differences in SCSI support level and also the product revision of the virtual disk themselves (version 1
to 2).

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It is important to note that simply upgrading to ESXi 6.5 will not provide SCSI-6 support. The virtual hardware for the
virtual machine must be upgraded to version 13 once ESXi has been upgraded. VM hardware version 13 is what
provides the additional SCSI support to the guest.

The following are the requirements for in-guest UNMAP to properly function:

1. The target virtual disk must be a thin virtual disk. Thick-type virtual disks do not support UNMAP.
2. For Windows In-Guest UNMAP:
1. ESXi 6.0 and later
2. VM Hardware version 11 and later
3. For Linux In-Guest UNMAP:
1. ESXi 6.5 and later
2. VM Hardware version 13 and later
4. If Change Block Tracking (CBT) is enabled for a virtual disk, In-Guest UNMAP for that virtual disk is only supported
starting with ESXi 6.5

In-Guest UNMAP Alignment Requirements

VMware ESXi requires that any UNMAP request sent down by a guest must be aligned to 1 MB. For a variety of
reasons, not all UNMAP requests will be aligned as such and in in ESXi 6.5 and earlier a large percentage failed. In
ESXi 6.5 Patch 1, ESXi has been altered to be more tolerant of misaligned UNMAP requests. See the VMware patch
information here:

https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2148989

Prior to this, any UNMAP requests that were even partially misaligned would fail entirely. Leading to no reclamation. In
ESXi 6.5 P1, any portion of UNMAP requests that are aligned will be accepted and passed along to the underlying array.
Misaligned portions will be accepted but not passed down. Instead, the affected blocks referred to by the misaligned
UNMAPs will be instead zeroed out with WRITE SAME. The benefit of this behavior on the FlashArray, is that zeroing is
identical in behavior to UNMAP so all of the space will be reclaimed regardless of misalignment.

 BEST PRACTICE: Apply ESXi 6.5 Patch Release ESXi650-201703001 (2148989) as soon as possible to be
able to take full advantage of in-guest UNMAP.

In-Guest UNMAP with Windows

Starting with ESXi 6.0, In-Guest UNMAP is supported with Windows 2012 R2 and later Windows-based operating
systems. For a full report of UNMAP support with Windows, please refer to Microsoft documentation.

NTFS supports automatic UNMAP by default—this means (assuming the underlying storage supports it) Windows will
issue UNMAP to the blocks a file used to consume immediately once it has been deleted or moved.

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Automatic UNMAP is enabled by default in Windows. This can be verified with the following CLI command:

fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

If DisableDeleteNotify is set to 0, UNMAP is ENABLED. Setting it to 1, DISABLES it. Pure Storage recommends this
value remain enabled. To change it, use the following command:

fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify 0

Windows also supports manual UNMAP, which can be run on-demand or per a schedule. This is performed using the
Disk Optimizer tool. Thin virtual disks can be identified in the tool as volume media types of “thin provisioned
drive”—these are the volumes that support UNMAP.

Select the drive and click “Optimize”. Or configure a scheduled optimization.

Windows prior to ESXi 6.5 Patch 1

Ordinarily, this would work with the default configuration of NTFS, but VMware enforces additional UNMAP alignment,
that requires a non-default NTFS configuration. In order to enable in-guest UNMAP in Windows for a given NTFS, that
NTFS must be formatted using a 32 or 64K allocation unit size. This will force far more Windows UNMAP operations to
be aligned with VMware requirements.

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64K is also the standard recommendation for SQL Server installations—which therefore makes this a generally
accepted change. To checking existing NTFS volumes are using the proper allocation unit size to support UNMAP, this
simple PowerShell two-line command can be run to list a report:

$wql = "SELECT Label, Blocksize, Name FROM Win32_Volume WHERE FileSystem='NTFS'"

Get-WmiObject -Query $wql -ComputerName '.' | Select-Object Label, Blocksize, Name

 BEST PRACTICE: Use the 32 or 64K Allocation Unit Size for NTFS to enable automatic UNMAP in a
Windows virtual machine.

Due to alignment issues, the manual UNMAP tool (Disk Optimizer) is not particularly effective as often most UNMAPs
are misaligned and will fail.

Windows with ESXi 6.5 Patch 1 and Later

As of ESXi 6.5 Patch 1, all NTFS allocation unit sizes will work with in-guest UNMAP. So at this ESXi level no unit size
change is required to enable this functionality. That being said, there is additional benefit to using a 32 or 64 K allocation
unit. While all sizes will allow all space to be reclaimed on the FlashArray, a 32 or 64 K allocation unit will cause more
UNMAP requests to be aligned and therefore more of the underlying virtual disk will be returned to the VMFS (more of it
will be shrunk).

The manual tool, Disk Optimizer, now works quite well and can be used. If UNMAP is disabled in Windows (it is enabled
by default) this tool can be used to reclaim space on-demand or via a schedule. If automatic UNMAP is enabled, there is
generally no need to use this tool.

For more information on this, please read the following blog post:

http://www.codyhosterman.com/2017/03/in-guest-unmap-fix-in-esxi-6-5-patch-1/

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 In-Guest UNMAP with Linux
Starting with ESXi 6.5, In-Guest UNMAP is supported with Linux-based operating systems and most common file
systems (Ext4, Btrfs, JFS, XFS, F2FS, VFAT). For a full report of UNMAP support with Linux configurations, please refer
to appropriate Linux distribution documentation. To enable this behavior it is necessary to use Virtual Machine Hardware
Version 13 or later.

Linux supports both automatic and manual methods of UNMAP.

Linux file systems do not support automatic UNMAP by default—this behavior needs to be enabled during the mount
operation of the file system. This is achieved by mounting the file system with the “discard” option.

pureuser@ubuntu:/mnt$ sudo mount /dev/sdd /mnt/unmaptest -o discard

When mounted with the discard option, Linux will issue UNMAP to the blocks a file used to consume immediately once it
has been deleted or moved.

Pure Storage does not require this feature to be enabled, but generally recommends doing so to keep capacity
information correct throughout the storage stack.

 BEST PRACTICE: Mount Linux filesystems with the “discard” option to enable in-guest UNMAP for Linux-
based virtual machines.

Linux with ESXi 6.5

In ESXi 6.5, automatic UNMAP is supported and is able to reclaim most of the identified dead space. In general, Linux
aligns most UNMAP requests in automatic UNMAP and therefore is quite effective in reclaiming space.

The manual method fstrim, does align initial UNMAP requests and therefore entirely fails.

Linux with ESXi 6.5 Patch 1 and Later

In ESXi 6.5 Patch 1 and later, automatic UNMAP is even more effective, now that even the small number of misaligned
UNMAPs are handled. Furthermore, the manual method via fstrim works as well. So in this ESXi version, either method
is a valid option.

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 What to expect after UNMAP is run on the FlashArray
The behavior of space reclamation (UNMAP) on a data-reducing array such as the FlashArray is somewhat changed
and this is due to the concept of data-deduplication. When a host runs UNMAP (ESXi or otherwise), an UNMAP SCSI
command is issued to the storage device that indicates what logical blocks are no longer in use. Traditionally, a logical
block address referred to a specific part of an underlying disk on an array. So when UNMAP was issued, the physical
space was always reclaimed because there was a direct correlation between a logical block and a physical cylinder/
track/block on the storage device. This is not necessarily the case on a data reduction array.

A logical block on a FlashArray volume does not refer directly to a physical location on flash. Instead, if there is data
written to that block, there is just a reference to a metadata pointer. That pointer then refers to a physical location. If
UNMAP is executed against that block, only the metadata pointer is guaranteed to be removed. The physical data will
remain if it is deduplicated, meaning other blocks (anywhere else on the array) have metadata pointers to that data too.
A physical block is only reclaimed once the last pointer on your array to that data is removed. Therefore, UNMAP only
directly removes metadata pointers. The reclamation of physical capacity is only a possible consequential result of
UNMAP.

Herein lies the importance of UNMAP—making sure the metadata tables of the FlashArray are accurate. This allows
space to be reclaimed as soon as possible. Generally, some physical space will be immediately returned upon
reclamation, as not everything is dedupable. In the end, the amount of reclaimed space heavily relies on how dedupable
the data set is—the higher the dedupability, the lower the likelihood, and amount, and immediacy of physical space
being reclaimed. The fact to remember is that UNMAP is important for the long-term “health” of space reporting and
usage on the array.

In addition to using the Pure Storage vSphere Web Client Plugin, standard provisioning methods through the FlashArray
GUI or FlashArray CLI can be utilized. This section highlights the end-to-end provisioning of storage volumes on the
Pure Storage FlashArray from creation of a volume to formatting it on an ESXi host. The management simplicity is one
of the guiding principles of FlashArray as just a few clicks are required to configure and provision storage to the server.

VMware Horizon 7 Configuration and Tuning

VMware Horizon View 7 configurations are quite minimal; some of the tuning is highlighted in the section.

Horizon Connection Server Tuning

1. Use SE sparse Virtual disks format–VMware Horizon 5.2 and above supports a vmdk disk format called Space
Efficient (SE) sparse virtual disks which was introduced in vSphere 5.1. The advantages of SE sparse virtual
disks can be summarized as follows:

1. Benefits of growing and shrinking dynamically, this prevents VMDK bloat as desktops rewrite data and
delete data.

2. Available for Horizon View Composer based linked clone desktops (Not for persistent desktops) only

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 3. VM hardware version 9 or later

4. No need to do a refresh/recompose operation to reclaim space

5. No need to set blackout periods, as we handle UNMAPs efficiently

2. We recommend using this disk format for deploying linked-clone and instant-clone desktops on Pure Storage
due to the space efficiencies and preventing VMDK bloat.
3. Disable View Storage Accelerator (linked-clones only, VSA must be enabled to use instant-clones)

1. The View storage accelerator, VSA, is a feature in VMware View 5.1 onwards based on VMware vSphere
content based read caching (CBRC). There are several advantages of enabling VSA including containing
boot storms by utilizing the host side caching of commonly used blocks. It even helps in steady state
performance of desktops that use the same applications. As Pure Storage FlashArray gives you lots of
IOPS at very low latency, we don’t need the extra layer of caching at the host level. The biggest
disadvantage is the time it takes to recompose and refresh desktops, as every time you change the
image file it has to rebuild the disk digest file. Also it consumes host side memory for caching and
consume host CPU for building digest files. For shorter desktop recompose times, we recommend turning
off VSA.
4. Tune maximum concurrent vCenter operations—the default concurrent vCenter operations on the vCenter
servers are defined in the View configuration’s advanced vCenter settings. These values are quite conservative
and can be increased to higher values. Pure Storage FlashArray can withstand more operations including:

1. Max Concurrent vCenter provisioning operation (recommended value >= 50)

2. Max Concurrent Power operations (recommended value >= 50)

3. Max concurrent View composer operations (recommended value >= 50)

The higher values will drastically cut down the amount of time needed to accomplish typical View Administrative tasks
such as recomposing or creating a new pool.

Some caveats include:

1. These settings are global and will affect all pools. Pools on other slower disk arrays will suffer if you set these

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 values higher, so enabling these will have adverse effects.
2. The vCenter configuration, especially number of vCPUs, amount of memory, and the backing storage has
implications from these settings. In order to attain the best possible performance levels, it is important to note the
vCenter configurations and size them according to VMware’s sizing guidelines and increase them as needed if you
notice a resource has become saturated.

References
1. Interpreting esxtop statistics - http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11812
2. Configuration maximums in vSphere 5.0 - http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere5/r50/vsphere-50-configuration-
maximums.pdf
3. Configuration maximums in vSphere 5.1 - http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere5/r51/vsphere-51-configuration-
maximums.pdf
4. Configuration maximums in vSphere 5.5 - http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere5/r55/vsphere-55-configuration-
maximums.pdf
5. Configuration maximums in vSphere 6.0 - https://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere6/r60/vsphere-60-configuration-
maximums.pdf
6. Configuration maximums in vSphere 6.5 - https://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere6/r65/vsphere-65-configuration-
maximums.pdf
7. Configuration maximums in vSphere 6.7

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