Test if the datastore can be unmounted

Lately I have been playing around with the new Storage related features in vSphere 5. One of the novelties is that you can now unmount a VMFS datastore and detach a SCSI LUN through the API.
To be able to unmount a datastore, some conditions have to be met. In the vSphere Client you get an informative popup that tells what is prohibiting the datastore unmount. If not all conditions are met, you can not continue with the unmount.

Nice feature, but what for those of us that want to automate this ?

Update October 28th 2012: Take into account that the datastorecluster is not connected to a host that is part of a cluster. Skip the HA heartbeat test.

Update April 23th 2012: Use the RetrieveDasAdvancedRuntimeInfo method to find the actual datastores that are used for the heartbeat.

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SIOC statistics

SIOC (Storage IO Control) is apparently a hot topic. There have been an important number of posts since it was made available with vSphere 4.1. On this blog, in my Automate SIOC post, you can find functions to verify and activate/deactivate SIOC from your PowerShell script.

A recent post on Yellow-Bricks, called Enable Storage IO Control on all Datastores! got quite a few comments and Tweets.

I was intrigued by one of the comments on Twitter that stated that the users didn’t understand what SIOC was all about. From several posts on SIOC I came to understand that the non-VI workload event would be fired when SIOC doesn’t see any latency improvements when it throttles the storage queue. Simple enough, but is there any data available that can make this visible ?

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Automate SIOC

With vSphere 4.1 came 150+ new features. One of these is called Storage IO Control or SIOC.And it has been a very popular subject in the last weeks. Just a small selection of blog posts on the subject:

The only thing missing was a way to automate everything surrounding SIOC. And so I decided to write a couple of functions to fill that gap.

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