Using the VCF CLI with CCI context to create Native Object Storage

In a recent post, I demonstrated how you could use the VCF CLI with CCI context to manage VCFA provisioned databases integrated with VMware Data Services Manager. I thought it might be interesting to demonstrate a similar set of steps, but with the objective of creating a Native Object Store. Once again, the VCF Command Line Interface (CLI) would be used, pointing to a VCFA endpoint and using the Cloud Consumption Interface. This would enable us to work in the context of an organization user to make requests. In this post, I will show how to retrieve an API token,…

Native Object Storage Use-Cases

While there are many use-cases for object storage, I wanted to create a short post to highlight some of the use-cases that I have been trying out in my own lab. Two of the use cases are for backup and logs, and another is as an S3 Foreign Data Wrapper (FDW) for Greenplum databases. In the first use-case, I will show you how to configure an S3 bucket for both VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) backups and logs, both for the databases and the provider appliance itself. In a second backup use-case, I will show how you can configure a…

Bucket Policies in VCFA 9.1.1 for Native Object Storage

In an earlier post on object storage, we look at the role privieges that VCF Automation users could be assigned within an organization. Since the scope of object storage privileges is at the project level, we also looked at the role of Project Admins and Project Advanced Users. within a project. We saw how a Project Admin could grant access control to different Project Users, creating access control policies to control which s3 actions and which s3 resource that a user was allowed in a given project. In this post, I wanted to take this a little further. As mentioned,…

Identity Providers and Access Controls in VCFA 9.1.1 for Native Object Storage

In a previous post, I highlighted how to get started with Native Object Storage which is in tech preview in VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) version 9.1.1. In that post, we saw the role of the Provider Admin and the Organization Admin in VCF Automation (VCFA). We saw that the Provider Admin could create object storage on behalf of the tenant users within an organization, but could not actually create or view the buckets on the object store, nor see the access controls or anything else associated with the object store for that matter. We saw that the Org Admin had…

A first look at Native Object Storage in VCF 9.1.1

Many readers may have read this blog article on Native Object Storage from my good pal, Pete Koehler. In that post, which was published back in May of this year and coincided with the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) version 9.1 release, Pete talked about a tech preview of Native Object Storage. Well, with the release of VCF 9.1.1, the tech preview has now begun. Although the tech preview of Native Object Storage is not open to everybody, we will be working with a select set of customers and gathering critical feedback. Our objective is to have a robust Native Object…

Using VCF Automation 9.1 Blueprints to snapshot and clone DSM provisioned MySQL databases

In my VMware Data Services Manager 9.1 launch post, I mentioned that this release now has the ability to use vSAN ESA snapshots to create a copy of a MySQL database. I also mentioned that this snapshot could then be used to very quickly spin up additional copies of the database using the “clone from snapshot” feature. I also mentioned that this feature is not yet plumbed up into the VCF Automation UI, but that it is available via the API. And since that is the case, it is then possible to go ahead and create VCF Automation blueprint. The…

VCF 9.0 Volume Service – Consuming static RWX volumes via VKS

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. “Since RWX volumes are back by vSAN File Shares in VCF 9.0, you will need to have vSAN File Service enabled and configured. You will also have to tell the…