VMware Data Service Manager 9.0.2.0 has achieved General Availability (GA) status, and is now readily accessible from the Broadcom Download Portal. You can see the full DSM 9.0.2 release notes here. In this post, I want to revisit our efforts to integrate DSM with Aria Automation. It is true to say that most of our efforts are going into integrating VMware Data Services Manager 9.x with VMware Cloud Foundation Automation 9.x.

VMware Data Service Manager 9.0.2.0 has achieved General Availability (GA) status, and is now readily accessible from the Broadcom Download Portal. You can see the full DSM 9.0.2 release notes here. In this post, I want to revisit our efforts to deliver a Microsoft SQL Server data service. As mentioned in a number of previous posts, we continue to work towards a fully supported Microsoft SQL Server data service in DSM.

It's been some time since I looked at how to use the Velero CLI to backup and restore some modern applications running in a Kubernetes cluster. However, after publishing how to use the new VKS Manager (VKSM) Data Protection (DP) earlier this week, it was mentioned that many customers who are on their VCF 9.x journey and who are using the Supervisor and vSphere Kubernetes Service to deploy VKS clusters, have not yet deployed VCF Automation into their VCF stack.

One of the new features in VCF Automation version 9.0.1 is a feature called vSphere Kubernetes Service Management, or VKSM for short. This gives users access to many additional capabilities, such as Data Protection, Policy Management and Add-on Management to improve the resiliency, security, and functionality of your VKS clusters. In this post, I wanted to take a look at the Data Protection capability (VKSM DP for short), as this is something I looked at quite closely in the past.

As many readers are now aware, databases provisioned from DSM via VCF Automation have the option to create a vSphere Kubernetes Service cluster to host the database. The decision to use a VKS cluster or whether to use DSM's own Kubernetes cluster is based on the Infrastructure Policy. If the Infrastructure Policy is built on traditional vSphere resources, then DSM's own K8s is used.

In this post, we will take a look at another new feature of VCF Automation, IaaS Resource Policies. I will demonstrate how these IaaS policies can be used with Data Service Policies and DSM provisioned databases to fine-tune certain parameters related to the database. You may have already seen the concept of Data Service Policies in previous posts. These are policies set at the Provider level which can dictate which database engines, which database versions and which backup locations a tenant of an organization can consume.

In my previous post, I showed how the VCF Consumption CLI could be used to provision a MySQL database when Data Services Manager is integrated with VCF Automation. We could use the same VCF Consumption CLI to provision Postgres databases also. However, I wanted to show you another way that databases could be provisioned using blueprints in VCF Automation (VCFA). Readers may find this useful as it will allow you to track MySQL database instances provisioned via VCF Automation, even though the MySQL Data Service Policy and MySQL databases are not currently plumbed up into the VCFA UI (his will be added in a future release).

In Data Services Manager 9.0.1, we decided to remove the ability to create MySQL Data Service Policies (DSP) from VCF Automation (VCFA) UI until we can also provision MySQL databases end-to-end. Even though you could create a Data Service Policy via the UI in VCFA 9.0/DSM 9.0, you still had to use the API to create the database. We decided this might be a little confusing, so we disabled the MySQL DSP step in the UI for now and will re-enable it when we can provide the ability to create both MySQL DSP and MySQL database.

We have made significant improvements to the integration between Data Services Manager (DSM) 9.0.1 and VCF Operations 9.0.1. In version 9.0, the setup to send metrics from DSM to VCF Ops was a little complex, as per this earlier blog post on the subject. In DSM v9.0.1, we've added the majority of the steps into the DSM UI to make it much easier and much more straight to configure.

As the most popular DSM database, we always strive to improve our enterprise-ready version of PostgreSQL with each release. Data Services Manager v9.0.1 is no different. In this release, we have improved on the Disaster Recovery configuration. We want to enable Data Admins to seamlessly fail over and back between a Primary and a Secondary Postgres database, and make it easy to replicate in either direction.

Another new feature in Data Services Manager 9.0.1 is the ability to setup access to a Postgres database using Client Certificates. This security features removes the need for "password" based authentication. In order to be able to use this functionality, the Postgres database must already be configured with external/custom certificates. This includes the PEM formatted certificate chain that has the server leaf cert, any intermediate certs and of course the Certificate Authority (CA).

In this post, I will look at the steps involved in creating your own Harbor Registry, setting it up as a Supervisor Container Registry, and then pulling DSM Consumption Operator images for version 9.0.1 from the DSM appliance and pushing them up to the Harbor Registry. We will then deploy the Consumption Operator using the images in the Harbor registry, and modify the package.yaml and values.yaml to provide a true air-gapped environment for DSM 9.0.1.

In my most recent post, we saw how to setup a privileged user which would write SPNs for database users to enable Windows Authentication. We also saw how this user could update DNS entries automatically when a database is created. We followed these steps and provisioned a SQL Server instance. Once the instance was provisioned, we create a login for the owner and saw how the user could successfully login to the instance using Windows Auth.

Whilst Microsoft SQL Server is still in technical preview in Data Services Manager 9.0.1, our team continues to release significant enhancements for our customers as we gravitate towards full support. As I mentioned in the DSM 9.0.1 overview post, this release includes the ability to specify a privileged AD user who can create Service Principal Names (SPNs) for database users and update DNS entries.

The most visible feature in Data Services Manager (DSM) 9.0.1 is the appearance of some additional new objects in the navigation menu on the left hand side of the DSM UI. These are Namespaces and Data Services Policy. Customers who have already looked at VCF Automation, particularly as it integrates with DSM, may have some familiarity with these. Their purpose in DSM 9.0.1 is to align with RBAC features that are already in VCF Automation, specifically around multi-tenancy controls.

It gives me great pleasure to announce the availability of VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) version 9.0.1. Over the coming weeks I will be deep-diving into many of these new features, but for now I want to provide you all with a brief overview of the capabilities and enhancements that you can find in this release. Automated Active Directory integration for MS SQL Server…

On a recent customer call regarding Postgres instances and databases provisioned by Data Services Manager (DSM), there was a question regarding Active Directory / LDAP integration. Specifically, there was a question on how to automatically provide an Active Directory / LDAP group access to a Postgres database. Now, as many readers are aware, DSM already supports Directory Services such as Active Directory and LDAPS for Postgres databases.

I recently received a query regarding support for iSCSI in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0. To be exact, the query was related to iSCSI-backed VMFS volumes, and if VCF 9.0 could be built using these volume types. It took a little bit of digging, and a few questions to our product management team, but I finally got an answer to the question.

Following on from my previous post on this topic, a number of people reached out to ask about how to add read-write-many (RWX) volumes to a Pod in VKS. Again, for dynamic volumes, this is quite simple to do. But what about some static volumes which were initially created by the Volume Service. This is a summary of what I posted in my previous blog in relation to RWX volumes.

I have been spending some time looking at the new Volume Service in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0. Through VCF Automation, is is possible for tenants of VCF to provision their own volumes. These volumes can be consumed by the VM Service, something that has been a part of the Supervisor Services for many years. However, it is also possible for workloads running in VKS, the vSphere Kubernetes Service, to consume the static volumes provisioned via the Volume Service.

Continuing on from the VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) 9.0 introductory videos from my most recent post, these next two videos look at how to configure VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Automation in VCF 9.0 with DSM to provide a true DBaaS (Database as a Service) experience to your VCF tenants and end users. The first video looks at the setup steps and goes on to provision a Postgres database using a traditional, DSM-Manager infrastructure policy through VCF Automation.

In the following videos, I demonstrate how to install the VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) 9.0 appliance via the vSphere Client Plugin mechanism. I then take a look at how to to build out first infrastructure policy, which allows a VI Admins to put guard rails around which resource are being consumed by the DSM data services. This prevents data sprawl…

A few weeks back, I was invited by Pete and John to join them on their Virtually Speaking Podcast. As the guys said, 'If you’re curious about what “Database-as-a-Service” really looks like in a VMware Cloud Foundation environment, this episode is for you'. Enjoy!

Following on from my previous post on how to send VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) 9.0 metrics to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Operations, I now want to show how it is also possible to send the DSM database metrics to Prometheus. In this post, I will demonstrate how to ship metrics to Prometheus, and of course, use Prometheus as a data source for…

In the DSM 9.0 Release Notes the following item about metrics is listed in the What's New section: You can use the VMware Data Services Manager API to publish PostgreSQL and MySQL metrics to VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 (VCF) Operations and Prometheus [..] enabling better visibility, alerting, and performance management for all databases that VMware Data Services manages. In this post, I will show how to configure DSM 9.0 to send Postgres and MySQL database metrics to VCF 9.0 Operations.