relationship between clusters and host groups
Due to circumstances beyond my control, over time and several upgrades of vSphere, there is no longer any commonality between the clusters in vSphere and what I see as host groups in the FlashArrays....
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Hi guys, thanks for all the suggestions. To clarify more and not throw anyone under the bus - if anyone has worked with "composable infrastructure", it allows people to rebuild blades and sometimes the WWPNs don't always remain. In most cases the WWPNs are still aligned with host names. The problems I see are that they decided to A) rename clusters and B) sometimes rename hosts and C) moved hosts between renamed clusters. All this came about largely due to not doing in-place vSphere upgrades but each "major" upgrade was a greenfield and thereby left to the whims of the virtualization team to build things "different" than was seen in the old vCenters, so, at one time I had everything 1:1 matching clusters to host groups, names, etc. and I (previously) did all provisioning via the plugin (because why wouldn't you). But over years (I delegated much, took eyes off the environment some) and several upgrades it is no longer recognizable to me and yes, I suspect I will have to methodically go through each environment to verify WWPNs match hostnames, etc. The plugin seems to be able to do the basics - resize datastores for example but I'm leery of updating host groups and removing/adding hosts because of the disconnect. Another example - as you know clusters can have spaces in names - host groups (at least from what I see in 6.5 purity) so "how does it know?". Should I convince the VMware team to standardize and name-match or what?
thanks
Yeah, that makes perfect sense, gear can definitely throw things off once WWPNs and hostnames start drifting. What you’re seeing happens a lot when teams rebuild vCenters and clusters instead of upgrading in place. The Pure plugin really depends on consistent naming and WWN alignment, so once that’s gone, it’s smart to be careful about using it for host group changes.
If you can, get the VMware team to standardize names again and use same cluster and host naming across vCenter and the array. It’ll make the plugin usable and predictable. In the meantime, I’d pull a current WWPN list from both sides and clean it up manually. Once you’ve got that alignment back, it’ll save a ton of confusion later.
Purity 6.5 doesn’t like cluster names with spaces. Stick to clean alphanumeric names if you can. Until things are standardized, I’d handle host group edits directly from the array CLI or REST rather than through the plugin.
Try to push for naming consistency. Once that’s fixed, everything else (plugin ops, automation, reporting) falls back into place. Also push for change management and CMDB changes - that will make your life easier....
Last advise, if people do not know how to use plugins, do not allow access...
