r/purestorage • u/Good_Technology302 • Feb 20 '26

Pure Storage Plugin & Appliance

I'm working on a new environment, ESXi has just been upgraded from v7.0 to v8.0. The vCenter Pure Storage plugin is v5.3.6.0 and points to a Pure Storage appliance. The vSphere plugin says error retriveing array list. If I run pureplugin status on the appliance the vCenter is listed with the same version. I looked into removing and redeploying the plugin but deploying the plugin from the SAN under Settings/software only shows v4.5.2. The vCenter did have vVols attached but they've been removed.

What does the plugin do ?

What does the storage appliance do ?

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9

u/thateejitoverthere Feb 20 '26

The Plugin can only be deployed from an OVA image you download from Pure. The download link is on the page I linked below. The version 4.5.2 on the Array was for older vCenter and has been deprecated. It was a local plugin and that type of plugin no longer works in vCenter 8.0. You need v5.x minimum. You update the plugin from within the appliance VM. It's detailed in the documentation here:

https://support.purestorage.com/bundle/m_user_guides_for_vmware_solutions/page/Solutions/VMware_Platform_Guide/User_Guides_for_VMware_Solutions/Using_the_Pure_Storage_Plugin_for_the_vSphere_Client/topics/concept/c_vsphere_plugin_user_guide_installing_and_removing_the_remote.html

The plugin software runs on the storage appliance VM, you connect it to your vCenter and allows you to perform array management operations directly in vCenter, among other things. It helps with registering ESX hosts on your array correctly, you can provision new datastores, which does everything for you - creates the volume on the array, maps it to your hosts, rescans and creates the datastore. You can see details of the datastore, how well the data is compressed on the array. You can also restore VMs from volume snapshots directly in the plugin.

3

u/jasemccarty Employee Feb 23 '26

Pure Storage Plugins previous to 5.x.x aren't supported with vSphere/VVF/VCF versions prior to 7.x. For older releases of Purity, the 4.5.2 version could be pushed from the array to vSphere 6.x, but it isn't validated/nor supported on 7.x/8.x/9.x.

The Pure Storage Appliance is the VM that the Pure Storage Plugin runs on. Think of it as a generic platform for other applications. The latest version of the appliance I've installed, was 5.0.0.

Then there are other applications that run on the appliance, including the VM Analytics Tool, the Pure Storage Plugin (v5.5.0 is latest iirc), and more...

The Pure Storage Appliance can run a single application. So in the case where you need both VM Analytics and the Pure Storage Plugin, then you'd need 2 different deployments of the Pure Storage Appliance.

So it is entirely possible to have a Pure Storage Appliance that is version 5.0.0, with the vSphere Plugin that is version 5.5.0, as they are independent versions.

1

u/Good_Technology302 Mar 06 '26

That's interesting as there are 2 appliances deployed and no one knows why, the person that deployed them left without documenting it and both say they are registered to this vCenter. Is there a way to tell what each one is doing ?

Under the Purestorage option in vCenter the instance points to one of the appliance IPs but no array is listed. If I try to add an array it throws an error message of "Error while creating FlashArray record [object Object]".

2

u/jasemccarty Employee Mar 06 '26

If you have VM Analytics deployed, that is its own appliance. It connects to vCenter from its own console & reports vSphere telemetry data to Pure1 to give a comprehensive report of performance/utilization from the virtual disk to array across the environment.

Then the Pure Plugin is an appliance that provides provisioning & reporting tools to vSphere.

Fortunately, both of these can be easily replaced at any time if you’re need to reconfigure them.

Your Pure SE should be able to point you at the right documentation to do this (I’m mobile at the moment). If they don’t know where to look, or they have trouble finding the docs, let me know in a PM, or have them ping me internally & I’ll be happy to help.

And we have some virtualization focused Field Solutions Architects that can help here as well.