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 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…

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.

Getting Started with Data Services Manager 2.0 – Part 10: Consumption Operator

One of the common asks we get from customers on Data Services Manager (DSM) 2.0 is the following: “I already run Kubernetes. Is it possible to create databases from my existing Kubernetes clusters using DSM?”. The answer is Yes. We provide a piece of software called the DSM Consumption Operator. This installs on your local Kubernetes (K8s) cluster and allows admins or developers to request the creation of databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL). On receipt of this request, DSM provisions its own K8s cluster, and then provisions the database on top. Your admins or developers can then connect to the database and…

New Aria Operations True Visibility Management Pack Releases

I have been using Aria Operations and True Visibility Management Packs quite a bit recently. This is mostly to get visibility into databases that are being provisioned by VMware Data Services Manager (DSM). I just learnt that we released a bunch of new Management Packs (v9.1) only last week, including updated Management Packs for both PostgreSQL and MySQL. In this post, I will deploy a new PostgreSQL database via Data Services Manager (DSM) 2.0, add the necessary database configuration options and extensions, and then add the database to Aria Operations True Visibility for PostgreSQL databases for monitoring. You might ask…