Nimble storage integration with Nimesa

In my company, one of our prospects is running an on-premise vSphere data center and the storage is backed by HP Nimble

HPE Nimble Storage is a predictive flash storage technology developed by Nimble Storage that was based in San Jose, California founded in early 2008. Nimble Storage produced hardware and software products for data storage, specifically data storage arrays that use the iSCSI and Fibre Channel protocols and includes data backup and data protection features. Nimble is a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

I got the access to their environment to integrate Nimesa with Nimble storage, Earlier I integrated Nimesa with multiple storage servers like Nexenta, DDN IntelliFlash, InfiniDat and Pure Storage.

Nimble REST API

With my experience of integrating with multiple storage vendors, I planned to complete the integration work in a couple of days, and some testing for a week.

Nimble is exposing REST APIs and the document for our targeted Nimble Storage Version 4.5.2.x version is available online https://infosight.hpe.com/InfoSight/media/cms/active/public/pubs_REST_API_Reference_NOS_51x.whz/lbb1529630299502.html

We got the environment with Nimble Storage, vCenter and the ESXi attached to it.

Connectivity to the Array

I developed the REST client to connect with the Nimble Array to do operations like Manage Snapshots, Volumes, Initiators and Targets.

The communication will be like

1. Obtain the API Session token using the username and password
2. Use the token (X-Auth-Token) in the Header to execute the API calls

Sample API to get the token

POST : https://nimble-node1:5392/v1/tokens

{
	"data":{
		"username":"asvignesh", 
		"password":"asvignesh"
	}
}

Response:

{
    "data": {
        "app_name": "",
        "creation_time": 1578295599,
        "id": "someid",
        "last_modified": 1578295599,
        "session_token": "tokenstring",
        "source_ip": "localhost",
        "username": "asvignesh"
    }
}

Also published on Medium.