Creating All-Flash Diskgroups on DL380 Gen 9 using PowerCLI

By | February 27, 2017

In a previous post, I discussed how the Web Client makes it difficult to create hybrid diskgroups grouped by array controller. I provided a PowerCLI script to automate diskgroup creation for this case. With All-Flash, the same issues around array controller grouping exists. A new issue that I encountered is that the “new-vsandiskgroup” cmdlet that I used in my previous script does not work with all-flash. The cmdlet expects a single SSD name to the -ssdcanonicalname argument and an array of HDDs as the argument to -datadiskcanonicalname. The cmdlet will check the disk if it is reporting as SSD or HDD.

I was fortunate enough to find a blog post from Rawlinson Rivera where he had a PowerCLI script to stand up an All-Flash VSAN from scratch. What i found is that he does not use the new-vsandiskgroup cmdlet, he uses the get-esxcli cmdlet and then uses esxcli commands to tag the SSD disks as “capacityssd” and then create a VSAN diskgroup out of those disks and a cache SSD. The script is more end-to-end than what I have, so I have extracted the pertinent section and retrofitted my previous script.

Note that I filtered for the P440 array controllers. I also found the model numbers of my SSD drives, but you could also use other methods to differentiate between cache and capacity. I initially differentiated by the size of the SSD (this is probably easier to tweak for different implementations as well). Script create-vsanAllFlashDiskgroup.ps1 is available at Github and below.

 

 

 

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