Kubernetes Persistent Volume (PV) Encryption with Native Key Provider in vSphere 8.0U3

Security is top of mind for most, if not all, of our customers these days. Many years ago, I wrote a blog post on how customers could encrypt Kubernetes Persistent Volumes with an external Key Provider. One of our customers recently reached out to me to ask if we had any plans to provide similar support with the Native Key Provider. As my focus has been in other areas recently, I reached out to our CSI engineering team for an update. I then found out that support was added in our most recent release, vSphere 8.0U3. While no changes we…

Provisioning databases with Aria Automation, Cloud Consumption Interface and Data Services Manager – Part 4: DSM

Welcome to the 4th and final part of configuring the Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI) in Aria Automation to enable a user to provision databases using one or more Supervisor Cluster Namespaces. In the previous 3 parts to this setup, we saw how to install Aria Automation v8.17 for CCI support, and how to install the CCI Service onto the Supervisor.  In the most recent post, we went through the steps to configure the CCI to allow an Aria Automation user create Namespaces on a Supervisor and subsequently provision Kubernetes clusters using the TKG Service and VMs via the VM Service.…

Provisioning databases with Aria Automation, Cloud Consumption Interface and Data Services Manager – Part 3: CCI Config

In this series of posts, we saw in part 1 how to setup Aria Automation version 8.17. This is required for Cloud Consumption Interface support. In part 2, we saw how to enable the Cloud Consumption interface (CCI) in the Supervisor of vSphere with Tanzu. However, even though CCI is now deployed as a Supervisor Service, it is not yet completely configured to work with Aria Automation. Thus, it is still not yet possible for an Aria Automation user to interact with the Supervisor in vSphere with Tanzu to create TKG clusters or VMs using the VM Service. This is…

Provisioning databases with Aria Automation, Cloud Consumption Interface and Data Services Manager – Part 2 : CCI

In the part 1 blog post, we discussed how to setup Aria Automation version 8.17 so that it could be used with Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI) to provision databases using Data Services Manager. In this post, we will look at the steps to integrate Aria Automation with CCI. There is a dependency here on vSphere 8.0U2 and vSphere with Tanzu, which we will assume has already been deployed. Thus, the main task at this point is to setup and enable the CCI Service on the Supervisor Cluster of vSphere with Tanzu. (Although I haven’t done a blog post of vSphere…

Provisioning databases with Aria Automation, Cloud Consumption Interface and Data Services Manager – Part 1: Setup

I recently read a blog post by my colleague Maher on some enhancements made to Aria Automation version 8.17 to include an on-premises version of our Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI).  As per our documentation, CCI enables Automation Service Broker DevOps users to provision Supervisor namespaces and use its associated services to create Kubernetes workloads using mainly the VM Service and the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service within vSphere namespaces. What really peaked my interest was an update from our own Data Services Manager (DSM) product team stating that we could also used the new version of Aria Automation version 8.17 with CCI to…

Data Services Manager 2.0 – Part 11: Simple troubleshooting guidance

As with any product that requires some configuration steps, it is possible to input some incorrect information, and not notice that an issue has occurred until you try some deployments. In this post, I want to share some of the troubleshooting steps that I have used to figure out some misconfigurations I made with Data Services Manager 2.0. Note that this process relies on the admin having some Kubernetes skills. If this is an area you wish to develop, head on over https://kube.academy where there are a number of free lessons to get you started. You may also like to…

Data Services Manager 2.0 – Consumption Operator (Video)

This video highlights another interesting feature of Data Services Manager (DSM) 2.0, namely the Consumption Operator. This allows customers with existing Kubernetes deployments to request DSM to provision databases from these K8s clusters, without switching context to either the DSM Gateway API or DSM UI. The videos shows how to install the operator and enable bindings for both infrastructure policies and backup locations. These bindings mean that only those resources can be used by end-users or developers who wish to create databases using this method.