WFA Feature?

[justin_smith]

Would WFA help me add already provisioned storage to hosts/clusters within vCenter? FC or NFS?

[hill]

short answer... YES!!!

longer answer is that WFA can help extend storage processes into full-stack storage services.

If you want to see some sample workflows that create storage and then interface with vCenter... please look HERE, HERE, and HERE.

Best,

-Kevin.

[justin_smith]

I've read about the Pirate Pack but Im not sure it will do what Im looking for.

I dont necessarily need/want the VM guys to create the storage, but I want the storage that has already been provisioned and presented to a cluster or host to be added to the host or cluster with WFA... make sense?

I imported the .dar files and they seem to create the volumes then add.

[goodrum · Accepted solution]

Justin,

It does make sense.  One of the benefits of the pirate pack is that it can be used by the Storage Administrators to provision and create the storage for VMware environments.  Now, one of the biggest benefits is in consistency and standardization of provisioning.  Instead of going into System Manager and provisioning new Volumes, Lun, iGroups as individual elements and then mounting with vCenter; the entire process can be streamlined and standardized. 

On to your question, what you are asking is not terribly difficult to do but is not bundled into the Pirate Packs. The idea is that you want to pass an element (Volume or Lun) to the user inputs and then have WFA map it to the host (or export in the case of NFS) and follow that up with a call to vCenter to create the datastore.  This can definitely be done.

I am working on a couple of new flows to find all of the NetApp storage in a specific ESX cluster and then set the access (exports or igroup) to the appropriate NetApp array for a newly added ESX host.  In this case, I am not provisioning new storage but rather bringing a new blade online.  I have this working pretty well for NFS for traditional Data ONTAP and clustered Data ONTAP.  I still need to work on the VMFS portion (FCP and iSCSI). 

Jeremy Goodrum, NetApp

The Pirate

Twitter: @virtpirate

Blog: www.virtpirate.com

[justin_smith]

Very nice.

Let me know if you need someone to test it out for ya!

[dburkland]

I'd be happy to test out your NFS + VMware storage provisioning workflows also!